Invention: The Master-key to Progress. Fiske Bradley Allen
was more mature) it lacked much of the element that was the highest in the Greek, the element that gave Greek civilization greater influence on history than any other civilization ever had – the creative element. The creative period of Greece ceased when her political liberty was lost. Furthermore, the immense amount of wealth that poured into the Grecian cities and the Græco-Oriental world, by reason of the putting into circulation of gold that had been stored away in Oriental palaces, as well as by the commercial exploitation of the riches of the East, brought about a general effeminizing of all classes of society, and the consequent dulling of their minds.
Nevertheless, there was great intellectual activity in the Græco-Oriental world, and a certain measure of invention, though little was of a basic kind. Euclid improved the science of geometry, and put it in virtually the same shape as that in which it has been taught since, even to this day. Aristarchus, the astronomer, announced the doctrine that the earth revolves around the sun and rotates on its own axis; and Hipparchus invented the plan of fixing the positions of places on the earth by their latitudes north and south of the Equator and their longitude east or west of a designated meridian. Hippocrates and Galen conceived and developed the foundations of the science of medicine of the present day. Eratosthenes estimated with extraordinary accuracy the circumference of the earth, and founded the science of geography.
But the greatest of all of the original workers of that time was Archimedes, who lived at Syracuse in Sicily, and was killed by mistake when Syracuse was captured in the year 212 B. C., while engaged in drawing a geometrical figure on the sand. His principal fame is as a mathematician; but as a great inventor of mechanical appliances, he is the first man recognized as such in history. The invention with which his name is most frequently linked is that of the Archimedean screw. This consisted of a tube, wound spirally around an inclined axle, and so disposed that when the lower end of the tube was dipped into water and the axle was rotated water would rise in the tube – as shavings do when a screw is screwed down into wood. It constituted a very convenient pump and was so used. This was, of course, a mechanical invention of the utmost originality and value, and forms one of the clearly defined stepping-stones to civilization.
There seems to be a belief in the minds of some that Archimedes was the inventor of the lever. The lever was, of course, invented long before he lived; but the laws of its operation and the principle that the weight on each side of the fulcrum, multiplied by its distance from the fulcrum, is equal to the weight on the other side, multiplied by its distance (when the lever is in equilibrium), seems to have been established by him.
Many stories are told of his exploits when Syracuse was besieged by the Romans, but they are rather vague. The best known story is that he arranged a great many mirrors in such a way that he concentrated so many rays of sunlight on some Roman ships that they took fire. Whether this is true or not is not definitely known; but many centuries later Buffon, the French scientist, made an arrangement of plane mirrors with which he set fire to wood 200 feet away.
The greatest single exploit of Archimedes was his discovery and demonstration of the hydrostatic principle that the weight of liquid displaced by a body floating in it is equal to that of the body. The story is that the king gave him the apparently impossible task of determining the quantity of gold and the quantity of silver in a certain gold coin, in making which the king suspected the workmen of stealing part of the gold and substituting silver. Pondering this subject later while lying in his bath, Archimedes suddenly realized that his body displaced a bulk of water equal to that part of his body that was immersed, and conceived the consequent law; and the conception was so startling and so vivid that he rushed unclad out into the street crying, "I have found it, I have found it."
The story as a story may not be exactly true; but if Archimedes had realized the full purport and the never-ending result of his conception, he would probably have done something even more eccentric than he did.
Archimedes esteemed mechanical inventions as greatly inferior in value to those speculations and demonstrations that convince the mind, and considered that his chief single work was discovering the mathematical relation between a sphere and a cylinder just containing it.
Whether this discovery and the discovery of the hydrostatic principle just mentioned were inventions or not, depends, of course, on the meaning of the word invention. Within the meaning of the word as employed heretofore in this book, both seem to have been inventions. Each made a definite creation and each caused something to exist, the like of which had never existed before. Furthermore, the mental processes followed resemble very closely the conception and formulation of a religion or a theory, the conception and composing of a new piece of music, story or poem, the conception and developing of any new plan or scheme; the conception and embodying in material form of any mechanical device.
It is not asserted, of course, that all inventions are on a dead level of equality, simply because they are inventions. Evidently there are degrees of excellence among inventions as among all other things.
CHAPTER IV
INVENTION IN ROME: ITS RISE AND FALL
We have noted, up to a time approximately that of Archimedes, a continual succession of inventions of many kinds, that formed stepping-stones to civilization so large and plain, that we can see them even from this distance.
We now come to a period lasting more than a thousand years, in the first half of which there was a gradually decreasing lack of inventiveness shown, and in the latter half a cessation almost complete.
The nation that followed Greece as the dominant nation of the world was Rome. She became more truly a dominant nation than Greece ever was; but her civilization was built on that of Greece, and her success even in war and government was due largely to following where Greece had led. That Rome in her early days should have followed the methods of Greece was natural of course; for the two countries were close together, and the methods of Greece had brought success. The early religion of Rome was so like that of Greece that even to this day the conceptions of most of us regarding Zeus and Jupiter, Poseidon and Neptune, Aphrodite and Venus are apt to become confused.
Like the Greeks, the Romans first were gathered in city-states that were governed by kings; and as with the Greeks, more republican forms were adopted later. In one important particular, the Roman practice diverged from the Greek, and that was in incorporating conquered states into the parent state, and granting their inhabitants the privileges of citizenship; instead of keeping them in the condition of mere subject states. The Roman system was somewhat like the system of provinces established by the Assyrians. It forms the basis of the "municipal system" of the free states of the present day, in which local self-government is carried on, under the paramount authority of the state.
It may be pointed out here that the conception of such an idea and its successful development into an effective machine of government by the Romans constituted an invention; though in view of what had been done before by Assyria and Greece, it cannot be called a basic invention.
The early Romans were very different in their mental characteristics from the Greeks; for they were stern, warlike, intensely practical, and possessed of an extraordinary talent for what we now call "team work." As a nation they were not so inventive as the Greeks; but the Roman, Cæsar, was the greatest military inventor who ever lived.
As might be expected, their early endeavors pertained to war, and their first improvements were in warlike things. One improvement that was marked by considerable inventiveness was in changing the phalanx into the legion. The phalanx, the historian Botsford tells us, was "invented by the Spartans, probably in the eighth century B. C.," and consisted of an unbroken line of warriors, several ranks deep. The Thebans improved on this; and from the Theban, Philip developed the Macedonian phalanx with which Alexander fought his way through Asia. The Romans under Servius Tullius developed this into the Roman phalanx, which was different only in detail. The essential characteristic of the phalanx was strength. This was gained by the close support given by each man to his neighbor, the personal strength of each man and the trained co-operation of all. A tremendous blow was given to an enemy's line when a phalanx struck it.
In the early wars among the hills of Italy, the Romans found the phalanx too rigid for such uneven country; and it was in endeavoring to invent a substitute that they finally developed the legion. This machine was