Men Who Have Made Millions from Their Own Inventions

It is the general impression that the man who makes a great invention is more likely to die poor than rich.

The impression is due partly to the oft told stories of the misfortunes which befell Whitney, who invented the cotton gin; Goodyear, who first vulcanized India rubber, and Morse, who taught the wire to write, and partly to the ingenious, half-trained, out-at-elbow chaps you and I and everybody else know who are always trying to introduce a motor that won’t mote, an airship that won’t fly or some other contrivance that won’t work, or, if it will, is not wanted by the public.

Of course plenty of inventors have been done out of their just dues, but, generally speaking, the truth about their financial returns doesn’t square with the general impression. The man whose ingenuity, whose persistence and whose practical sense enable him to devise a new contrivance for the material benefit of his fellows is as certain of his financial reward as the grocer, the banker or anybody else.

Nothing but bad luck or the lack of business ability can keep him from making money, and the records show that inventors, at least those who have invented the big things, have been as lucky as the average, and have displayed more business ability than the general run of mankind.

Though the fortunes won by James Watt, who invented the steam engine; George Stevenson, who built the first practical locomotive, and Robert Fulton, who contrived the first steamboat that would go, would not bulk large by the side of modern fortunes, these men were amply rewarded in their day and generation both in money and in honor. Fulton the least of the three, perhaps, because of his death, at the comparatively early age of 50, in 1815, while in the midst of his experiments with the submarine torpedo.

The rewards won by inventors in the last 50 or 60 years have been far in excess of those gained by the earlier geniuses, both actually and relatively. Here is a little list:

The sewing machine was credited both to Elias Howe and Isaac M. Singer. Both died millionaires.

The reaper was invented by Cyrus H. McCormick, who amassed a vast fortune. His sons are among the famous multi-millionaires of to-day.

The telephone, devised by Alexander Graham Bell, has made him so rich that he can spend as much as he likes on kites, in flying machine experiments, without making the people laugh at him.

Ocean telegraphy was made possible by the inventions of William Thompson, knighted because of them and now known as Lord Kelvin, and immensely wealthy as well as highly honored.

Wireless telegraphy, the invention of William Marconi, is likely to make him a millionaire in time, if he has not already passed that financial mark.

Cheap steel, which made the steel rail possible, was the invention of Sir Henry Bessemer, whose profits amounted to millions before his death, and whose rewards included all sorts of honors as well as money.

Dry plate photography was invented by George Eastman. The dry plate made the amateur camera possible. Eastman is so rich he doesn’t know what to do with his money.

The air brake was invented by George Westinghouse. It revolutionized railroading. He has followed invention as a business ever since and is now one of the most remarkable figures in the whole world of practical science and industry, besides being a millionaire over and over.

Duplex telegraphy and the incandescent light were the products of the genius of Thomas A. Edison, millionaire and the most famous electrician alive.

“The rotating field” and the transformer which “steps” the high tension current “down” or “up” were devised by Nikola Tesla, and gave modern electric railroading a great impetus. If Tesla is not a millionaire it is solely because he doesn’t care to be one.

To make a complete roster of the devices that have made their inventors rich in the last half century would be to fill columns and columns. It would contain the names of many contrivances and men well known in the world of science and industry, but not often heard of by the general public.

In circles well informed upon such matters it is known that George B. Selden, whose inventions covering the use of gasoline and other explosive motors for automobiles are now returning royalties to him on every devil wagon made of the explosive hydrocarbon type, is fast becoming eligible to the millionaire inventor class. At present he seems to hold the bulk of the automobile industry in the United States in the hollow of his hand. His success is startling to those who for years were vastly more amused than anything else by his inventive efforts.

Selden is a Rochester, N. Y., man, now just under 60. His father was a Judge of the New York State Court of Appeals, and, with Hiram Sibley, was interested in the early telegraphic enterprises of the country. Always well-to-do, he was willing to allow his son, when a boy, to devote his time and a reasonable amount of money to his fondness for “puttering around” with mechanical contrivances.

When he was 11 years old, George B. took a walk one day with his father and D. S. Morgan, later a successful harvester manufacturer. It was at the time of the wheat harvest, and the two men talked about the possibility of reaping machines, then new to the world, and of self-moving road wagons. Their talk fixed the idea of power wagons in the lad’s mind. When he was older it bore practical fruit.

It was his idea from the first to invent something — he doesn’t seem to have cared much what — that would bear patenting and would produce a fortune. He studied law in the meantime, making patent law a specialty, as much, perhaps, to enable himself to look after his interests as an inventor as anything else.

To the world at large he seemed for years to consider the law as altogether the most important thing in the world, but his intimate friends have always known that his devotion to the profession has really been secondary to his enthusiasm as an inventor.

For a long time he had an office in one of the best known buildings in his city, where he worked over his models, where he showed them to his friends and where they often gathered to smoke, to tell stories and to have a good time generally. Selden always took his models seriously, but the other fellows didn’t; they were attracted mainly by the man’s picturesque personality; they looked upon his pursuit of invention mainly as a rather amusing fad, harmless because his income, first from his father and, later, from his own patent law practice, was so big that he could afford to use up time and money on a fad if he wanted to.

From time to time he took out patents; no outsider knows how many or for what they were granted. One of them was for a typewriter, which never materialized in a practical way.

But all the time he was working out his self-moving road wagon idea and, soon after the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 he told his friends that he had got the notion where he could handle it. In 1878 or 1879 he made his first application for a patent.

This application was not pushed at once, but he did build a horseless buggy, which was run upon the streets, the motive power being furnished by gasoline used explosively. His machine would run, too, but, curious as it may seem to the present generation, nobody save Selden himself appeared to think there was anything in it, and most of the newspapers ridiculed it as a “freak.” Selden didn’t mind all that, however; he just went right along practicing patent law for the immediate dollar and perfecting his invention for the future.

It has been said that the delay in the issue of his patent was due to difficulty in getting it allowed, but his friends have said that it came from an entirely different cause. Selden was always sure his horseless carriage had a great future, but he wasn’t sure when it would begin. Possibly the happy day wouldn’t come for decades, and if so the life of his patent would have run its course so early that there would be no rewards for him.

Like the shrewd patent lawyer that he is, he kept the application alive and continuously before the Patent Office by a change or improvement therein every year, and in 1895, deeming the world just about ripe for his invention, the patent was finally secured. It was not until 1898, however, that automobiling began to grow in such a way as to help Selden, but in that year the boom began in earnest.

At the beginning electric automobiles had the call; later the race appeared to be between steam and gasoline; still later, as now is the case, gasoline had the lead over both its rivals. Selden asserted that every one of the devices for using gasoline in automobile propulsion was an infringement on his patent and claimed royalty for every machine not steam or electric that was built anywhere by anybody.

At first his claim was laughed at as a freak idea. When suits were begun there was “scornful amazement”; the notion that possibly he was right seems to have occurred to nobody.

By 1903, though, “the other fellows” began to sit up and take notice, and when the Federal courts began to decide in his favor they began to capitulate. Later decisions brought in many of the others.

Not only have several of the big auto makers been paying for a year or two now, but they have formed an organization to help the inventor by prosecuting the makers who haven’t come in.

This organization, the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers, is now prosecuting Ford & Co. of Detroit. Most of the unlicensed manufacturers belong to the American Motor Car Manufacturers’ Association. They say they will fight till the United States Supreme Court renders final decision.

Mr. Selden refused the other day to say how much his royalties have amounted to, but he told a friend that the minimum for the present twelve months would be larger than he had ever made in any one year from his profession, except that in which he settled the famous Gordon-McCormick grain binder suit and collected $250,000. Foreign as well as American manufacturers have to pay. As the patent still has several years to run, and the automobile business is growing, his friends believe he is yet bound to be a genuine Midas. Meanwhile Selden sits tight, says as little as he can, and packs the royalties away in his private treasure chest.

It would be hard to find a man, whether in the ranks of the inventors or out of them, whose personal history has been more interesting or whose rewards have been more satisfying than George Westinghouse, contriver of almost innumerable inventions and improvements, who began with the railroad air brake.

At 59 Westinghouse, the employer of men in squads of 10,000, controlling works that make his machines in four European countries and Canada, as well as the United States, is still an inventor. In fact, he shares with Edison first place among those who carry on invention as a business, and includes among his employees more salaried inventors than any other man, or combination of men, except, possibly, his great rival, “General Electric,” or the Bell Telephone Company.

It was Westinghouse who, by taking up and encouraging Tesla, who is still in his employ, practically developed the electric railroad.

Westinghouse’s faith in Tesla and the alternating current were epoch-making. In fact, barring the locomotive itself and the steel rail, his air brake, invented when he was little more than a boy, his signals and his friction buffer have done more to make modern American railroading possible than any other and all other improvements.

Westinghouse wasn’t born rich. But he was born lucky, for he had a father who owned a shop at Schenectady, N. Y., in which agricultural implements were made. This was before the war, and George was allowed the run of the shop. He liked to fuss around with the machinery better than he liked to eat or to play, but there were few things about the shop that he didn’t think susceptible of improvement.

For instance, the slow moving and clumsy steam engine that furnished the power made the boy weary. He couldn’t see why the piston should be moved first in one direction and then the other, so that the only way to get circular motion was through a heavy power consuming crank and connections. He thought the piston could be more economically driven in a circle, to begin with, and by the time he was 15 had devised and built a rotary steam engine.

It wasn’t the first one ever built, of course, and it wasn’t economical, but it worked, and to-day he is turning out turbine engines in his vast Pittsburg works that are economically used in more than one big electric installation, while the great steamship lines and the navies of the nations are beginning to use them.

The civil war came soon after he had completed his rotary engine. He wanted to enlist at once, but he had to wait till he was 17 and tall enough to pass muster. Then he went in, first in the cavalry, but later was transferred to the Navy, serving as a third assistant engineer. Then he went to college a year, entering Union at 19, but at 20 he cut loose and began his career as an inventor in earnest, no doubt to the grief of many of his friends.

The Mount Cenis Railroad tunnel was being bored through the Alps at that time and he was much impressed with what he read of the compressed air drills. One day he saw a railroad collision, due to the inability of the train hands to stop a train quickly with hand brakes. If compressed air could bore a mountain, why could it not stop a train? He thought it could and he set to work finding out how.

It didn’t take him long to make a wooden model of his invention, but he hadn’t money enough to go any further. However, he convinced a young friend, son of a lawyer, that the scheme was good, and the youngster wheedled $500 from his father to pay for further experiments. Then came Westinghouse’s hardest struggle — to get big railroad men interested.

The classic story of his interview with Commodore Vanderbilt, during which the latter said it was absurd to think a railroad train could be “stopped with wind,” winding up with the declaration that he had “no time to talk with ——— fools” is good enough to be true, but Westinghouse is said to have denied it over and over.

But at all events the New York Central would have none of the invention, and it was first tested in 1867, on a part of what is now the Panhandle division of the Pennsylvania lines. On the very first trial of the brake, applied to an accommodation train, it prevented an accident before the train had been running fifteen minutes. A team was carelessly driven directly in front of the engine running at a high rate of speed, but the train was stopped in time by the air brake and no one was hurt. That settled the case in favor of the brake, of course. The progress of Westinghouse has been continuous and rapid ever since. To-day he is a big personal factor in many of the great enterprises of the world, entirely outside his own particular lines, among other things, of the Equitable Life Assurance Society, of which he is a director.

But he has had many a hard battle to fight in order to reach his present place, and in 1891 was so pressed for money that his failure was looked for. Before the worst came, however, the business men of Pittsburg raised $500,000 and helped him through, just as the business men of Cleveland are said once to have helped John D. Rockefeller when in straits.

None of George Westinghouse’s various enterprises is involved in any trust, his policy having been always himself to control whatever he went into. By manufacturing his own inventions it has been possible for him to realize great profits upon them. They cover many lines — years ago it was said his patents numbered thousands — and many have to do with railroading.

Besides the air brake, still the mint that never fails of profits, no matter what other departments of his activities may run short, the Westinghouse inventions and manufactures include railroad signals, steam engines, gas engines, motors and dynamos and no end of other electrical things.

He has nine great manufacturing plants in Pittsburg, his machine shops there being the biggest in the world; one in Canada, and others in England, Germany, France, Russia and Belgium. The capitalization of the Westinghouse Company is $75,000,000, the same as the Sugar Trust, and while there are many stockholders he controls.

His Pittsburg works of various sorts are connected by a railway fifteen miles long. He has homes in Washington and Lenox, Mass., as well as in Pittsburg; besides a suite is reserved for him the year around at the hotel St. Regis in New York. He has financial offices in London, Pittsburg and New York, and makes two trips a year to Europe.

When in this country he divides his time in the summer between Pittsburg, New York and Lenox; in the winter between Pittsburg, New York and Washington. He is the friend of statesmen, scientists, diplomatists and most of the world’s great folk in most lines.

He owns no racehorses, no steam yachts, no four-in-hand coaches; he doesn’t smoke; he doesn’t drink; he doesn’t care for society with a big S, but he spends money royally entertaining people he likes, and he devotes hundreds of thousands a year to amusements, though these are mostly scientific experiments that may lead to new inventions.

It was Westinghouse who led to the development of Pittsburg’s natural gas field; it was Westinghouse who built the first great electric motors for the first Niagara plant; it was Westinghouse who lighted the Chicago World’s Fair; whenever you travel by rail the Westinghouse air brake, the Westinghouse signals and the Westinghouse friction buffers insure your safety. He is possibly the most typical example living of the enthusiastic, imaginative inventor, who is also a keen, hard-headed business man.

Steel making has reached its highest development, both as to methods and yearly output in America — (Westinghouse once told the English that 3,000 men in the Carnegie Homestead Steel Works produced more steel in a year than 1,500 men in the Krupp Works, at Essen, Germany) — but it was an Englishman named Henry Bessemer whose inventions made possible the present age of steel.

To the commerce of the world, both by rail and water, this man’s inventions have proved quite as beneficial as Westinghouse’s air brake has proved to the railroads; without Bessemer steel of which to make rails strong enough to carry them safely, neither the swift twenty hour trains from New York to Chicago nor the enormously heavy freight trains of to-day could be run; without Bessemer steel the vast ocean liners that now plow the seas would be impossible. Combined, the inventions of Bessemer and Westinghouse have been two great determining forces in the development of the United States. Eight cities and towns in this country have been named for Bessemer, and of this he was extremely proud in his later years.

Bessemer made his steel invention about ten years earlier than Westinghouse invented the air brake, and had an infinitely harder time introducing it, perhaps because of English conservatism. In fact, although his steel was almost inconceivably better and vastly cheaper than any other, it was a long time before it could win its way.

The Westinghouse brake won almost instant favor after preventing one accident. In order to make the British railroad men appreciate his invention, Bessemer had to lay down a steel rail on a part of a railroad where the traffic was particularly wearing and wait till it had outworn twenty-three iron ones before its value was sensibly appreciated. After that even the conservative Britons could no longer hold out, and, as Bessemer had predicted years before, “the age of iron was finished; the age of steel begun.”

Bessemer’s first invention was a failure; the failure was brought about by his sweetheart, and, had it been a success, perhaps the world would still be without the steel rail. This first invention was the result of Bessemer’s intense desire to get married. His income as a youngster was too small to allow him to think of such a thing, and he knew he could increase it sufficiently by no ordinary means.

While he was trying to devise some way of making a little money, he heard that the British Government was losing $500,000 a year by reason of forged stamps. Then he worked night and day until he had contrived a plan so to make the stamps that their forgery would be impossible. He took the plan to the Government, it was accepted, and, as it required the building and installation of new works, he was appointed superintendent, at a salary of $5,000 a year.

Highly elated, he told his sweetheart about it. She was a clever girl and she suggested another scheme, infinitely simpler and less costly. Post haste then the young lover went to the Government officials with news of the simpler way. This plan, too, they accepted, but as it would require no new works, he was politely informed that the place he was to have would not be created, so that the marriage had to be still further put off after all.

This was in 1833, when Bessemer was 20. With the income he had expected, very liberal in his eyes then, he might not have been spurred on to the efforts which, more than twenty years later, in 1856-58, were crowned by success in the perfection of the invention which gave a new metal to the world.

His invention was not taken up at the Government’s Woolwich arsenal until it had been accepted everywhere else, and it has been said that his knighthood, which made him Sir Henry Bessemer, was conferred upon him not because of his steel, but after Bessemer himself had told Lord Beaconsfield the circumstances of the great saving the Government had realized through adopting his suggestion regarding forged stamps. The British Government forbade him, in 1867, to accept the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor from France. Later, however, guns made of his steel were the pride of Woolwich, and he was allowed to accept all the honors that came his way.

Bessemer died in 1898 at a great age. His wealth never approached the multimillionaire grade, though he was a millionaire even in England, where the pound sterling is the unit of wealth. In 1870, when the original patents had expired, his profits and royalties had been a million sterling, or $5,000,000, and his wealth was greater than that figure.

It was through the licensed use of Bessemer’s invention that Carnegie and all the American steel kings made their millions mainly, though two of them, Haywood Harvey, now dead, whose method of hardening steel revolutionized the making of armor for ships, and Charles M. Schwab were both inventors of improved steel processes. Harvey’s son is understood to be piling up more millions than ever his father accumulated. Schwab’s rating as a millionaire has fluctuated somewhat in the last few years, but as he now expects to have a Christmas house-warming of his Riverside marble palace in New York this year he may safely be included among the multi-millionaire steel inventors.

The Krupps of Essen, Germany, probably made more money than any other steel inventors, partly, however, because they have been at it longer than any of the others. Like Westinghouse, their millions have grown largely because they have always controlled the manufacture of their own devices; but the invention that enabled the original Krupp to develop the famous works at Essen had nothing to do with steel.

It was a machine for rolling silver plate from which to stamp out spoon blanks, the patents upon which he sold in London. This was in the early thirties, when the iron works at Essen employed only nine men. Already he had in mind the perfection of a steel gun barrel, but it was only a hobby with him for years after that.

Frederick Krupp, the founder of the works, established them in 1810; his son, Alfred Krupp, took them in 1848, and his son, Frederick Krupp, took them in 1887. He died in 1902 without a son, leaving the bulk of his fortune, and, in a way, the headship of his great works to one of his daughters, Bertha, as Coutts, the British banker, left his great financial institution to his daughter, upon his death, for lack of a son.

Frederick Alfred von Krupp, by the way, was one of the few untitled Germans to marry a woman of rank, and with the approval of the German Emperor. His wife, who is still living, was the Baroness von Ende. The fortune left to Bertha Krupp has been appraised at $150,000,000, a much larger sum relatively, by the way, than it would be in the United States, or even in England, and the great-granddaughter of the inventor who began with a machine to roll plates for the making of silver spoons is the richest young woman in the world.

It was Alfred Krupp, second in the line, who perfected the Krupp field cannon, which he first exhibited in London in 1851.

Dr. Richard Gatling, whose fame rests on the multi-barreled gun bearing his name, made money from his many inventions, but was not a multi-millionaire when he came to die, a few years ago. He had a hard time getting his gun before the world, and the United States Government, to which it was first offered in civil war times, did little with it.

It was invented less than fifty years ago, but his first invention, the screw propeller, was made much earlier, when he was really only a lad. This invention has never been credited to him, but to John Ericsson, the Monitor man, and rightly enough at that. Gatling regretted it to his dying day, but never felt sore at Ericsson, for as Gatling once told the writer, Ericsson must have invented it as early as he, and possibly without knowledge of Gatling’s work. It is one of the coincidences of invention history that Ericsson and Gatling offered the screw propeller at the Washington Patent Office on the same day, though Ericsson was several hours earlier in the day.

Ericsson himself was never paid by the Government for the money he spent on the Monitor, of which he never claimed to be the inventor, contrary to the general belief upon that point. It was Theodore Timby who devised the famous ironclad; it was Ericsson who built it. Ericsson’s first profitable invention, by the way, was a grain drill. He was working on a big gun when he died, but it was never perfected.

One of the fortunes considered noteworthy, even in this multi-millionaire country of ours, at least until the hundred-millionaire became so common, was won by Samuel Colt who devised the revolver. He invented it before 1850, but the fortune it created is still well worth while.

Colt was a boy inventor. He was born a year later than Sir Henry Bessemer, but died forty-three years ago at the early age of 48. When 14 he ran away from the home of his father, a woolen manufacturer of Hartford, Conn., and shipped aboard a sailing vessel bound for India.

Something, maybe a shooting affray, turned his attention to the need of a small firearm that would shoot more than once at one loading, and when he returned home, after the voyage was over, he had with him a wooden model of the first revolver, which he had whittled out of pine with a jack-knife.

His father wouldn’t or couldn’t advance the money to perfect the invention, and the young man studied chemistry with the chief dyer of the woolen mills. Then he went about the country lecturing on chemistry, charging a small admission fee. With the money he earned in this way he carried his revolver experiments through.

He founded the Colt’s Patent Arms Company, in 1835, to make his revolvers only. They didn’t sell, the United States Government rejecting them, as years later the British Government rejected Bessemer steel for the manufacture of heavy guns.

But, in 1847, when the Mexican War broke out, General Zachary Taylor sent for 1,000 revolvers. Colt’s company had been insolvent five years then, the works were closed, and not even Colt himself had a revolver in his possession to use as a model in filling the order. He whittled out a model in a hurry, however; the works were reopened and the order was duly filled. The first Colt’s revolvers had twelve barrels and, in action, the Mexicans were almost as badly affected by fright at seeing one pistol shoot a dozen times without reloading as by the bullets themselves.

Of course this gave the Colt revolver an enormous boom. The works had to be remodeled; in 1852 new ones, the largest arms works in the world, either government or private, were built, and, in 1861, when the civil war broke out, their capacity was doubled.

Colt went to England and addressed the House of Commons, and to Russia, where he had a special audience with the Czar. He built big revolver works in both countries, and J. Massey Rhind, the sculptor, has only recently completed a monument on an order from Colt’s widow, which bears bas reliefs, showing Colt as a boy whittling out his wooden revolver, and as a man addressing the House of Commons and interviewing the Czar. Mrs. Colt’s death occurred recently and she bequeathed a large slice of the Colt estate to the city of Hartford for a park.

The big fortunes of Hudson and Hiram Maxim, the latter knighted in England, by the way, because of the Maxim machine gun, are founded on inventions analogous to Gatling and Colt’s.

Millions from Electrical Inventions.

The three most famous living electrical inventors — one the richest of those making fortunes directly from inventions without depending upon manufacture — are Thomas Alva Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and Lord Kelvin.

The first is of American birth and ancestry. The second is a native of England, though his personal development has been mainly American, and, as he has said himself, the telephone is an American product. Lord Kelvin is Scotch-Irish by birth and thoroughly British in development.

Cyrus W. Field, an American, raised the money and furnished the enthusiasm, the executive ability and the persistence that called into being the ocean cable inventions on which Kelvin’s great repute are based.

No four men have done more to enlighten the world in every sense than this quartet.

Edison’s first noteworthy invention, the duplex telegraph, cheapened the transmission of intelligence incalculably. His incandescent light was revolutionary, his contribution to the perfected telephone was of great value, his phonograph — one of the few strictly original ones among modern inventions — opened a new world.

The telephone, legally and probably rightfully counted Bell’s, has made a greater revolution even than electric light.

Lord Kelvin’s galvanometer and siphon recorder bind the continents together with thin ropes of copper and India rubber, which by annihilating time in news transmission has quickened the pace of the race immeasurably.

Both Bell and Edison had to struggle to win success. Edison’s struggle was the harder, for he had little training of any kind, except what he got by himself, his father being an uneducated farmer with no money to pay out on his son’s schooling.

Bell had no money to begin with, but he had been trained as a teacher by his father, who was a teacher before him. He had no thought of using electricity when he began work on the telephone, but he did go at it in a thoroughly scientific way and was quick to make use of the electric current when he saw its possible utility.

Edison says he never was a scientific sharp, and couldn’t be one if he tried. He found out the secret of duplex telegraphy in his efforts to make his work easier as an operator, and all his inventions except the phonograph have been strictly labor saving in intent.

Bell was stimulated and helped in his work by his study of the human ear as an instructor of deafness, his sweetheart, the accomplished woman who is now his wife, being a deaf mute. His first exhibition of the telephone, in 1876, at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, was due to her faith in it at a time when he had become well-nigh discouraged. After he got the ’phone to Philadelphia, the examiners were not inclined to look at it, but were persuaded by Dom Pedro, then Emperor of Brazil, who was visiting this country and knew of Bell and his invention. The world knows the rest.

Lord Kelvin was by no means rich, when, as William Thompson, he began his career as an inventor, but he had been so well trained by his father, a professor in the University of Glasgow, that he was himself made a tutor here at 22, and soon afterward a full professor. In all his early life he never had to worry about his income, nor had he to force his inventions to the front. Backed by the university, his talents were always in demand.

He was made Sir William Thompson in 1867 and was raised to the peerage in 1892. He is now 81. His improved mariners’ compass had been almost as important in navigation as his siphon recorder and mirror galvanometer has in ocean cabling.

He is very rich, all the result of his inventions, and so is Edison, but the wealth of neither can compare with Bell’s. He is a multi-millionaire, surely, though nobody has enough definite information about his wealth even to guess its amount, and his name is not often seen in the lists of published millionaires.

Lord Kelvin’s inventions may never be rendered useless by Marconi’s but the latter will undoubtedly reap great financial returns from his wireless contrivances. Marconi never knew the pressure of poverty, by the way, his family being very rich to start with.

(Copyright, 1905, by Dexter Marshall.)