The origins of invention : a study of industry among primitive peoples

Preface

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At the celebration of the centenary of the American patent system in Washington (1891), I read a paper on the “ Birth of Invention.” The present volume is an expansion and illustration of the principles laid down in that paper. The history of the development of the inventive faculty is the history of humanity. In other respects we may resemble our friends the brutes, but here we part company intellec¬ tually, subdue and enslave them, and have dominion over the earth.

The term invention applies to four different yet related groups of phenomena : —

1. The things and institutions invented.

2. The mental acts involved. . 1396121

3. The rewards and benefits of these acts.

4. The powers and materials of nature invoked.

I hold that all industries, arts, languages, institutions, and philosophies are inventions. The history of the mental acts is the account of an evolutionary series, beginning with taking notice and following examples, and ending with the highest co-operation in a great industrial establishment, with a symphony, with the writing of a dictionary, or with the framing of a government. The benefit or reward has

PREFACE.

also followed by analogy the processes of creation in Nature, from a single advantage accruing only to the inventor, up to a world-blessing conception.

As to the resources and powers of nature invoked, these have come into the service of man according to the law of ever-increasing complexity of structure for the performance of a greater variety of functions. The order of commanding kinetic energy has been the employment of —

1. Man-power in every pursuit.

2. Fire as an agent, in cooking, pottery, metallurgy, &c.

3. The power of a spring as in a bow or trap.

4. Beast-power, for burden and traction.

5. Wind-power, on sails, and mills, and in draught.

6. Water-power, as a conveyance, and a motor, and gravity or weight generally.

7. Steam-power, utilisation of an expanding gas.

8. Chemical power, in the arts of the civilised.

9. Electric power, motors, message-bearers, in mechanics and illumination.

10. Light as a mechanical servant, only beginning to be domesticated.

With Professor Payne I hold that the course of civilisa¬ tion has been from naturalism to artificialism. And upon the lines of Mr. Spencer’s division of activity into regulative and operative categories, it is the regulative side that exhibits the greatest differentiation and improvement. For instance, in simple tools, consisting of a working part and a manual part, it is the latter that has undergone enormous differentiations in applying the variety of kinetic energies.

I wish to express my gratitude to Professor Tylor, General Pitt Rivers, and Sir John Lubbock, without whose aid no one could write upon primitive technological subjects ;

PREFACE.

to the Smithsonian Institution and the Bureau of Ethnology at Washington for a thousand favours ; to Mr. E. F. im Thurn, Mr. Man, and other modern travellers and ethnolo¬ gists who, under the inspiration of the British “ Notes and Queries,” have vastly improved the material upon which studies are founded. I have been greatly aided by Professor Payne’s History of America, and Mr. Henry Balfour’s studies in the evolution of art, by M. Adrien de Mortillet’s writings, and by the investigations of Mr. J. D. McGuire, Dr. Walter Hough, Professor Holmes, and Mr. F. H. Cushing.

O. T. M.

Introduction

In this volume I desire to trace some of our modern industries to their origins, and to show how the genius of man, working upon and influenced by the resources and the forces of nature, learned its first lessons in the art of inventing. If the reader were to visit one of our great laboratories or mechanical establishments, he would see an army of skilled and intelligent men working together purposely to bring about larger results with less expenditure of effort. No one of these men would dream of doing all this work alone. A few years ago it would not have been possible for any number of men even to undertake it. There has been orderly procession, therefore, in the task to be done, and there has been growing complexity of organisation in the agency to be employed. In short, there is a close analogy between the natural history of the kingdoms of nature and the unfolding of the arts of life. The methods of studying the one may be successfully employed in a search for the true history of the other.

The term “invention” is here used in its plain, logical sense of finding out originally how to perform any specific action by some new implement, or improvement, or substance, or method. Fundamentally, it is a change in some one or all of these.

From the point of view here assumed, every change in human activity, made designedly and systematically, appears to be an invention. Not only mechanical devices, whose working models might have been stored in the vaults of prehistoric patent offices and the relics of which fill our museums, were inventions ; but the processes of life, language, fine art, social structures and functions, philo¬ sophies, formulated creeds and cults, — all these involve over and over again the same activities of mind.

“ Institutions,” says Emerson, “ are not aboriginal, every one of them was once the act of a single man, every law and usage was a man’s expedient to meet a particular case.” 1

The foreshadowing of this faculty of finding out how is seen in the animal world. In certain exigencies even the invertebrates seem to have concentrated their intellectual activity upon methods of safety or escape. The conduct of one of these creatures in such emergencies is most instructive. First, it discovers a necessity, then follows a short period of confusion, finally the creature buckles down to hard thinking and experiment. The persistence of these humble inventors is often remarkable. Having conceived that a way of escape lies in a certain direction, it yields only to exhaustion or death. Sir Samuel Baker gives a picture of an immense elephant shaking a hegliktree three feet in diameter to secure the fruit. 11 The elephant butted his forehead against the trunk, the large tree quivered in every branch.” 2 The creature had made a discovery and the shaking of the tree by the momentum of his body opened a new world of food supply. Had he gone further and made up a cushion to place between the tree and his head, that would have been an invention of the higher order rarely seen in the animal world.

This act of inventing involves the four causes of Aristotle,

1 Emerson, Essay on Politics.

2 Ismailia, New York, 1875, p. 230. See also Rep. Brit. Ass., 1893, p. 86 r.

INTRODUCTION.

namely, the material, the formal, the efficient, and the final cause. Or, to be more explicit, every invention is made out of something, into some predetermined form, by means of certain apparatus and agencies, and to achieve some definite result. The change may be in any one of these. The inventor excogitates an alteration of causes or of movements. In primitive life and in the most cultured this is equally true ; only, in the latter, machinery performs the motions which in savagery must be iefTected by the human body.

Again, the term invention involves three sets of phe¬ nomena — the mental acts of inventing, of thinking out how ; the things invented, usually called inventions ; and the rewards bestowed on the inventor, nowadays called patents, but granted in some form during all the ages. In this work frequent allusion will be made to the growing intricacy of thought developed and demanded by this process through all history, terminating in the laboratories of invention with their cooperating experts, learned in every branch of science and mechanics ; but commencing with the relief of discomfort through a happy thought, by means of some slight modification or new use of a natural object.

Very similar to this cooperative invention in the laboratory or great mechanical establishment, is the united effort of a tribe, a community, a nation, a race, an age, the whole human species. The results of united effort, along the lines of activity, constitute the genius of each one of these. We speak of the genius of a man, meaning simply what he has invented, or of an age, having in mind all that it has done originally or found how to do in a new and striking manner. The unfolding of the genius of the ages has been the evolution of invention from the beginning.

The elaboration of rewards bestowed upon inventors from age to age should not be neglected. In this as in the other series of phenomena there has been increasing complexity and a sort of evolution. The public recognition and reward of invention may itself be said to have been invented. At first the public accorded really nothing. The man seized his own patent. His better bow or fish-hook got him more food, made him stronger, more acute, taught him that ingenuity is better than force, secured him admiration, respect, fear, obedience, homage, a larger number of wives, a more numerous following. The comforts, emoluments, distinctions, and power of able men were their first patents. Infringement upon such monopolies became dangerous and further originality was discouraged. Later in history, the tribe absorbed the benefit, then the state. Empty emolu¬ ments and public honours took the place of personal comfort. The inventor was crowned, or knighted, or medalled, or mentioned in the public fetes . The history of the modern patent system would involve all of these.

“ The education of the Indian,” writes Morelet, “ com¬ menced early. When ten or twelve years of age, a machete is put in his hands and a load, proportioned to his years, upon his shoulders, and he is made to accompany his father in his excursions or his labours. He is taught to find his way in the most obscure forests through means of the faintest indications. His ear is practised in quickly detect¬ ing the approach of wild animals, and his eye in discovering the venemous reptiles that may lie in his path. He is taught to distinguish the vines, the juices of which have the power of stupefying fishes so that they may be caught by hand, as also those that are useful for their flexibility or for furnishing water to the wayfarer. He soon comes to recognise the Leche Maria , the precious balm with which he can heal his wounds, and the guaco , which neutralises the venom of serpents. He finds out the shady dells where the cacao flourishes, and the sunny eminences where the bees deposit their honey. He learns or is taught all these things early, and then his education is complete.” 1

But the chief object in view in this work is to follow out the lines of evolution or elaboration in the things invented. The shelter is the ancestor of the palace, the skin robe of 1 Morelet, Travels in Yucatan, New York, 1871, p. 129.

INTRODUCTION.

the elaborate costume, the aboriginal roast of the costly dinner, the digging-stick of the steam plough, the carryingstrap of the burden trains and ships, and so on to the end of all the products of human activity in every direction. To trace out what constitutes an invention in this last sense is the history of original thought. What is really proposed is a study of those simple tools and processes out of which modern industrial life has grown. The finding out that a stone is hard and often sharp was a discovery, and the act lies within the capacity of very lowly creatures. But the slightest modification of that stone for industrial purposes was an invention, it was a step in that line of artificiality 1 which constitutes the progress of man. From this point of view, an invention, at first, was a slightly modified natural object or process. Every elaborative series exhibited in a museum should commence with such a specimen.

This barely modified natural object is susceptible of further changes, of added parts, of more complicated structure, of more diversified functions, passing in time from the simple to the complex, from the monorganic to the polyorganic. Exactly as one sees in the natural world in geologic time plant and animal forms becoming more and more highly organised, so in the constructions pro¬ ceeding from men’s minds and hands there has been a corresponding development and increased complexity and multiplied functions. In fact, the history of industry is the story of the greater diversity of materials used, of the more complicated thought in the mind of the inventors, of the perfection of tools and processes, which take the place of hands and feet and brain, and, lastly, of the final causes of the products of men’s brains and hands. The play of these diversified motives and materials upon one another is one of the most interesting objects of human thought.

1 “A change which has completely transformed human society, and to which the principal features which distinguish civilisation from savagery are traceable — the substitution of an artificial for a natural basis of subsistence” (Payne, History of America, New York, 1892, vol. i. p.303).

i8

THE ORIGINS OF INVENTION.

Under the leadership of Gustav Klemm, the Germans have given to this theme the name of Culturgeschichte , and to its development his successors have devoted most serious consideration.

By analogy with the natural world those invented things or processes, those mental efforts involved in the act of inventing, those rewards of invention which obtained in the childhood of the race, also survive into the present, and may be seen in operation in every person’s life ; they are like those protophytes and protozoans, unicellular creatures which were once the only living things, which constitute now the majority of the life of the globe and which enter into the constitution of every higher organism in great numbers.

Necessity is commonly said to be the mother of invention. That is, all changes in human action are stimulated by man’s needs. Now there are two classes of these, namely, those that act from within the individual, and those that affect him from without.

Of the former, hunger is the loudest. By hunger is meant the desire for food, or drink, or whatever enters the alimentary canal. The sense of fatigue and the desire for rest ; the pain of monotony and the desire for change ; the reproductive sense and many more, belong to these sub¬ jective stimuli.

The desire for warmth or cool shelter, or refuge from the storm, the sense of danger in the presence of savage beasts or men, in short, the discomforts which are produced by the want of harmony between a man and his environment constitute the second class of stimuli.

In the more lowly organised creatures, dwelling in the water, this disharmony is feeblest. The light, the tempera¬ ture, the movements, the specific gravity even, are almost unchanging. In plants, which draw their nourishment from one spot, it is more varied. By an ascending scale terrestrial animals rise as they are wrought upon by the greater variety of stimuli.

INTRODUCTION.

Exactly as the inventive faculty, the things invented, and the rewards have passed through interesting evolutions, in which also the old ever survives into the new, so in the matter of stimuli there has been a parallel history. The pains of hunger are not the same in savagery and civilisa¬ tion. The desire for house and clothing, and conveniences and art-products, and society and literature, and the ex¬ planation of things are childish in the one case, most exalted in the other. The evolution of human wants, therefore, is a part of the history of invention.

Just as there is an intimate relation between animals and plants on the one hand, and terrestrial phenomena and resources on the other, giving rise to phytogeography and zoogeography, so in the natural history of inventions there is the same relation never to be neglected. This corre¬ spondence or harmony between arts and industries and all that goes to make up environment enables the ethnologist to comprehend the proprieties of each region, and often to decide whether an art is indigenous or exotic. The study of this relationship between man’s activities and the effect of his surroundings we may call technogeography, and the necessity of its careful study will appear at every point.

Nothing is more common than the assertion that men do not purposely invent in the lower civilisations, that they simply follow the leading strings and the mandates of Nature. The savage, it is said, does not invent, he simply borrows his clothing from the animals, his house from the trees and caverns, his food from many sources. He is an out-and-out imitator.

Now, nothing will be said here against Nature and her resources, her training school, and her wonderful teachers. Nor will it be denied that most men and women borrow everything and that all men and women follow suit in much that they do. This imitative process always supposes the existence of the thing to be imitated ; the latter does not account for the origin of the process.

Furthermore, the whole amount of human progress

THE ORIGINS OK INVENTION.

is undoubtedly to be accredited to human intelligence and volition. All Nature is clay in the hands of the potter. The suggestions of her three kingdoms are only the patterns hanging in the shop of the cabinet-maker or the modeller. The artificer and creator is man himself. Whatever may be one’s theory regarding the manner, the place, the time of man’s advent upon this planet, all agree that he was at first a houseless, unclothed being, without skill or ex¬ perience, and that by the exercise of his faculties he has become the clothed philosopher. There is a sense in which the race may be said to have invented itself, proceeding against Nature often, with Nature often ; but always from naturalism to artificiality. Men were placed on earth to dress and keep it, to possess and subdue it. Through this wonderful faculty of invention the race has fulfilled its mission.

An objection to the opinion that physical nature is the most important element, in civilisation is the well-known fact that the latter has progressed most rapidly, not in those favoured spots where food and raiments and shelter could be procured with the least effort, but in those regions where the quest for these things afforded the best school for the training of every faculty of the mind, where there were the greatest stimuli to exertion. In those places where Nature is too lavish the tribes of men have led a languid existence.

By laying too much stress upon the notion that the human race has borrowed all its plans and methods from Nature, one is apt to forget that the best of instruction has no effect on dull pupils, as every pedagogue will testify. The forms and movements of all things terrestrial were lying before the senses of animated nature for millenniums before our race arrived. How very few of them aroused the apperception of the brute, and stimulated him to those never-ceasing changes which constitute the life of progress. The profound teaching of Nature fell upon those who having ears, heard not.

INTRODUCTION.

One is perpetually hearing sociologists saying that men do not invent customs, but fall into them. Grant that the ninety and nine do follow suit, and in addition grant that each one of us follows his leader all but the thousandth time. It is the one act in a hundred or a thousand that each one originates, which constitutes the progress of the world. Again, we read that peoples do not invent civilisa¬ tion, but borrow it ; that one man left to himself would die, and that no people ever arose by itself. Borrow from whom ? Where did the first lender get his stock ?

It is inconceivable. It would be ungrateful to the ingenious minds that have brought a whole species of ignorant and inexperienced creatures to know and to conquer the world in an incredibly brief time. If we ignore or deny the existence of this adventurous spirit of climbing for the sake of being higher, of learning for the sake of knowing, of inventing for the sake of inventing, then, indeed, would aeons on aeons have been necessary for the evolution of our species, and man would have had to start farther back than Tertiary times to have drifted by mere imitation to achieve so much.

It is difficult to imagine the motives which actuate ethnologists in rendering their applause so grudgingly to this genius of invention. Mr. Wake says : u The in¬ genuity displayed by the Australians in overcoming the many difficulties they have to contend against in dealing with the hard conditions of nature is often, no doubt, very great. Great ingenuity is undoubtedly shown in the native weapons, one of which, the boomerang, would appear to be unknown, in principle at least, by any other race. It must be noted, however, that we do not know the progressive stages through which the boomerang has arrived at its present perfection, and that it may have been an accidental recognition of an operation of Nature.” 1 Now, is not that too bad? The boomerang arriving at its present perfection ! Accidental recognition of an operation of 1 C. S. Wake, J. Anthrop. Znst., London, 1872, vol. i. p. 75.

THE ORIGINS OF INVENTION.

Nature ! Was it not just such a history, of a humbler sort, as that of the rifle, the locomotive, the alphabet, the electric light ? Recognition of the operations of Nature constitutes the genius of invention. The Australian or humble people just like him commenced this wonderful process. Those cunning little creatures, as Emerson called them, invented the boomerang. And there is not a patent office in the world that would refuse to grant them letters for the exclusive use thereof for seventeen years.

The civilised man passes his whole life in the midst of wheels and cranks and engines of iron. His eyes are on them every day. Now and then a new thought occurs to him in their motion. An improvement which would facilitate their action and lessen his pains or expense. That is called invention, for which he seeks a patent. The savage man passes his life away from wheels. He never saw a wheel until the new-comer showed it to him. But there are around him all sorts of suggestive things that take the place of wheels. He sees how he could improve them so as to facilitate their action, and so as to lessen his labour and multiply his gains. He makes the change. Is not that an invention also ?

It surely ought not to fill this magnificent age with envy to admit that intimations at least of our times were heard long ago. The monorganic form of a tool from which a machine is a polyorganic evolution or elaboration ought, according to the nature of things, as they are now under¬ stood, to have come first. Furthermore, these old forms ought to have survived and do survive here and there, just as preglacial genera of butterflies may be seen even now flitting about Mount Washington, in New Hampshire. In the crude art of the French caves is found the prophecy of a people who in this last day should set the fashions of the Western world.

According to Le Bon, “ The higher races have never been influenced by a foreign civilisation more rapidly than the lower races ; and if they have sometimes adopted creeds,

INTRODUCTION.

institutions, languages, and arts, different from those of their ancestors, it was not till they had slowly and profoundly transformed them and brought them into relation with their mental constitution.” 1 Compare this with oft-repeated assertions that no race or people has ever raised itself to any higher culture. The race or people that did not lay at least one dressed stone on this stately edifice can not possibly have survived.

Schweinfurth says : “ A people, as long as they are on the lowest steps of their development, are far better characterised by their industrial products than they are either by their habits or by their own representations, which are often in¬ correctly interpreted by others.” 2 3 This is entirely in accord with what the present writer has said about the double history of the race, that written in words and that written in things and actions. The former is circumscribed in time and place and intelligibility ; the latter is universal, like the objects upon which it is based.

Again : “ It is among the most secluded inhabitants, indeed among the rudest tribes, who are partly still addicted to cannibalism, aye, in the very heart of Africa, whither not even the use of cotton stuffs and hardly that of glass beads has penetrated, where we find the indigenous mechanical instinct, the delight in the production of works of art for the embellishment and convenience of life, the delight in self-acquired property best preserved.” 3

Captain Spicer, a whaler, who mingled with the Eskimo, told the writer that they often make invention a part of their sport. They go out to certain difficult places, and, having imagined themselves in certain straits, they compare notes as to what each one would do. They actually make experiments, setting one another problems in invention.

1 Le Bon, Pop. Sc. Month., New York, 1893, vol. xlii. p. 342.

2 Schweinfurth, Heart of Africa, vol. i. p. 257. Quoted in Artes Africanae, London, 1875, p. x.

3 Schweinfurth, Artes Africanae , London, 1875, p. ix. See also Man, Andaman Islanders , London, p. 26.

THE ORIGINS OF INVENTION.

There is another error, equally illogical, into which a great many writers have fallen, of supposing that the ancients and prehistoric peoples were possessed of arts and mechanical appliances far in advance of aught we have nowadays. These are called “ lost arts,” and it is averred that they are now beyond the sagacity of man.

The answer to this argument is in the words of the wise man, “ To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.” The thing that hath been is the thing that may be, if it is desirable. The reason why arts are lost is that they have become antiquated by others higher in the scale, or because they were practised by a limited number who moved in a side current, whose secret died with them.

Sir John Lubbock quotes Mr. Wallace as saying that man is no longer influenced by “ natural selection, and that his body has become stationary.” 1 This is a mooted question ; the oldest human skulls yet found are capacious enough, and there are no data at hand to show whether or not the brain is growing. But the work which this brain has to perform in making inventions has been growing, and there¬ fore no one will doubt that it has increased in agility and knack. The brain may acquire knack as well as the hand. At first it had none of this quality, and had to peg away laboriously for hours and even days to comprehend and perform indifferently what it now does with celerity and ease.

In the higher walks of invention there is a perpetual rivalry between the mechanic and his work, between the scientist and his apparatus. In the lower levels of progress this emulation is often between the savage man and the material in which he works, or the tool with which he achieves his result. If one were to mark the history of sculpture he would notice at once a constant increase in the intractability of the material. This increase would also be coupled with a parallel improvement in the means of

1 Lubbock, Prehistoric Times , New York, 1872, p. 591.

INTRODUCTION.

overcoming the resistance. Each success would embolden the sculptor to venture upon still finer rocks. As long as there were one mineral in sight that he could not work, this would be a standing menace to his ambition. The handier he became in mastering the stone that he had already attacked, the more eager would he be to find more difficult material to master.

Now these minerals are not scattered evenly over the earth. There is no flinty rock in the West Indies, but there is abundance of volcanic material and of granular rocks. What reckless waste of energy to spend one moment in trying to achieve therein such results as the chipped stone objects in use where quartz or flint abounded ! The ancient Arawak wasted no time along that line, but from his rocks, that lent themselves peculiarly to the pecking and polishing process, elaborated the most beautiful stone implements in the world. There is abundance of evidence upon this matter. The ivory art of the Eskimo, the black slate art of the Haida, the red catlinite art of the Sioux, the jade art of China, the beautiful flint art of Western Europe in pre¬ historic times are in point, and, without doubt, it was in a certain sense the beautiful marbles of Greece and Italy that set up that duel between the man and his material which resulted in the grandest sculpture of the world. In fact, when national glory itself declined, the world still turned to these spots for artists, and sent thither its sons to breathe the divine afflatus.

A great deal that has been written about primitive industries and inventions is wide of the mark, because the writer has failed to take into account what may be called the knack of the age, or the tribe, or the particular method. He has described it as clumsy, and said that he could not for the life of him imagine how people could get along with such appliances. But they did. You will see a professional ethnologist sweating for hours to get a spark of fire with two sticks. The savage will do it for him in as many seconds. By and by the former acquires the knack, and then his