Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/493

Rh blunt instruments with which his ancestors had to be content before they came into contact with the white man. What an acquisition the white man's fish-hook must have been to the Indian!

Fifty years ago a large part of the people of this country had no other resource for artificial light than the tallow-candle. I remember it, and the vexations attending its use, the difficulty of lighting it by a coal of tire, the constant snuffing it required to make its light tolerable, and its constant tendency to melt and besmear everything in its vicinity. I venture to say that any of you would consider it an intolerable hardship to be compelled to use it and nothing else. Those who used oil-lamps got a little better light, but not much less discomfort. Gas was used only in the large cities. But the inventors have been busy in providing a new material for illumination and the means for using it and in cheapening their production; and now in kerosene and in kerosene-lamps, both of which have been called into existence within thirty years, the poorest people can enjoy, at the most trifling expense, a light better far than anything which anybody could command at any price before the invention of gas less than a hundred years ago.

Can we estimate the comforts of the homes of the country due to these inventions? Can we estimate the greater value of the evening hours for work, or study, or reading, which these inventions have given them?

I remember that my mother had a vial of what she called rock-oil, which she thought very good for sprains or bruises. It was said to have come from Western New York. I now suppose it to have been petroleum. Petroleum has been known to man for a long time, but it had no value till it came under the hands of the inventor. He has made a worthless article a blessing. Invention marks every step of its history. Petroleum in this country lies deep in the earth. By the aid of recent inventions man reaches it. By their aid he stores it, for it is a dangerous and difficult article to keep and transport. By invention, man has changed its character. And now, not only this country, but the whole world, is lighted by this new material. Yet all the invention which has been bestowed upon it would have been wasted but for another class of inventors and another lino of inventions. The lamps had to be invented or improved, and hundreds of men have been engaged on their improvement for years.

And now inventors have entered a new field and given us a light for our homes and streets almost as brilliant as that from the sun itself, from that agent which, since the world began, has lighted up the sky in angry flashes only to alarm timid and superstitious man.

It is a curious and interesting exercise to take any common article of daily use and inquire how much invention has been involved in its production; what inventions have preceded it; what ones, if any, it has supplanted, and what ones it gave birth to; what consequences