* * * * *

[Continued from SUPPLEMENT, No. 802, page 12810.]




THE BUILDERS OF THE STEAM ENGINE--THE FOUNDERS OF MODERN INDUSTRIES
AND NATIONS.[1]

[Footnote 1: An address delivered at the Centennial Celebration of the
American Patent System, Washington, April, 1891.]

By Dr. R.H. THURSTON, Director of Sibley College, Cornell University.


Papin, Worcester, Savery, were the authors of the period of
application of the power of steam to useful work in our later days.
The world was, in their time, just waking into a new life under the
stimulus of a new freedom that, from the time of Shakespeare, of
Newton, and of Gilbert, the physicist, has steadily become wider,
higher, and more fruitful year by year. All the modern sciences and
all the modern arts had their reawakening with the seventeenth
century. Every aspect of freedom for humanity came into view in those
days of a new birth. Both the possibility of the introduction of new
sciences and of new arts and the power of utilizing all new
intellectual and physical forces came together. The steam engine could
not earlier have taken form, and, taking form, it could not have
promoted the advance of civilization in the earlier centuries. The
invention becoming possible of development and application, the