Book Description

Excerpt from The Boy's Own Book of Great Inventions The purpose of this book is to tell the story of some few of the great epoch-making inventions, to trace their influence upon world progress and to describe, so far as possible, simple experiments, embodying the principles involved, for home laboratory work. Many very important inventions and discoveries have had to be omitted. The field to be covered is so broad and the limits of a single book so narrow that the selection of subject-matter has been of necessity largely a process of judicious elimination. But in a book of this sort it is not so important what particular subjects are discussed as it is to teach certain fundamental truths and to emphasize the tremendous influence upon human affairs of the so-called dreamer, the man of vision, who in spite of every obstacle of fate and man has blazed the path of progress for the race. We cannot point out too often that genius is very frequently but another name for imagination. The inventor and the poet are in spirit one. The poet creates a mental image and clothes it in words suggestive of the thought picture. The inventor conceives the idea of an instrument, fraught with great material possibilities, and embodies it in a suitable mechanism. Both the poem and the machine, as everything else in the universe, are mental creations. The most intricate piece of machinery existed in the mind of the inventor before it could be translated into visible and tangible form. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.