Prizes for Inventions

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WAY OF STIMULATING GENIUSES.

Large Rewards Offered For the Coming Year Which Will Make the Fortune of the Successful Inventor — How McCormick Was Led to Invent the Reaper.

It is becoming the fashion to offer large prizes for useful inventions in particular industries, and those possessing some inventive faculty thus find their reward already held out for them, and special directions given as to the nature of the invention desired. In the latter part of the nineteenth century a number of large prizes offered for inventions stimulated geniuses so generally that this method of encouraging invention is taken up now by many of our best scientific bodies. These prizes do not take away from the inventor the chances of royalties when their products are patented and manufactured. They are offered merely to encourage invention in certain fields where the need is great, and by directing talent in the right direction useful results are more certain. Professor Pupin, whose recent invention took a prize of fair amount, later sold his patent outright for half a million dollars, and others which have been successful in prize winning will undoubtedly find rewards in similar substantial ways.

There are a number of large prizes offered for the coming year, the winning of any of which will undoubtedly make the fortune of the successful inventor. The Noble prizes are worth over $80,000 each, and they will be given to the inventor or discoverer in three different lines of scientific work. Chemistry, physical science, and medicine or physiology are the fields in which competitors will be selected for the distribution of the prizes. The Pollak prize of last year for $20,000, for the best life-saving device invented, was not awarded to one inventor, but $2,000 of it was paid, and the balance will be given the coming year for new inventions in life-saving.

Not only scientific bodies, but private corporations, are beginning to adopt the prize method of stimulating inventors in any particular line. Last year the Hawaiian Planters' Association offered a prize of $6,500 for the best labor-saving machine adapted to the sugar business of the islands. There were several similar ones offered for minor inventions for the same purposes. These prizes called forth an immense amount of competition, and it was the sentiment of the association that enough useful ideas had been submitted to make the sugar manufacturing and planting of much greater benefit to the island. These ideas will not in any way be stolen, but, if patentable and of practical value, the inventors of them will be protected and awarded all the royalties that naturally accrue from their sales.

It has been long a practice of societies to offer rewards for discoveries and inventions of minor financial value to the discoverer, and also for those which were deemed impossible. There have been a dozen prizes offered for the most practical flying machine that would fly, and at one time a prize of a quarter of a million dollars was offered if the machine should appear within two years. The French Academy of Sciences in 1891 offered a prize of 100,000 francs to the first person who should succeed in communicating with any of the other worlds, except Mars. The reason for excluding Mars was a little mysterious, but the modification of the award prohibits Nikola Tesla from entering a claim for the prize, even if his recent announcement that he had received messages from that planet should prove true, and he were able to return them in kind.

It will be remembered by many that the English Academy of Science offered a prize of $10,000 for the invention of a practical grain and grass reaper nearly a century ago, and for forty years this offer was kept open. Nevertheless, the announcement of this standing reward was largely influential in encouraging the young inventor of the McCormick reaper to experiment until he had produced one of the greatest labor-saving machines of the age. Indeed, the English nation acknowledged that the new American reaper saved more wealth to the country than any other invention or machine that had ever been produced.

Many of the inventions most needed to-day in the different industries would never pay their producers any great amount because of the relatively small number that would be needed. Yet so important are these inventions that large prizes are now offered for them. The Standard Oil Company has several times offered cash prizes for minor inventions which would be of great financial benefit to the company but of little general value on the market. The only way to secure such inventions is to offer prizes for them. Inventors, as a rule, are as appreciative of the value of money as any other class of brain-workers, and they naturally direct their talents along lines which will yield them the greatest financial returns. The small inventions which everybody uses are consequently the magnets which attract, and, as a result. the more enduring and more beneficial inventions, viewed from a broad and philosophical point of view, are neglected.

For instance, the explosive nature of benzine — one of the most useful of substances — is considered so dangerous that the last Chemical Congress decided to offer prizes to the discoverer of a substitute, or to the chemist who could eliminate the dangerous elements from benzine. The prize was not so large that any inventor would be tempted to waste many years on the work, but, as explained by the papers at the congress, the inventor or discoverer would be so amply rewarded by royalties that no cash sum offered as a prize would be at all commensurate with them.

The prizes for inventions for the coming year are thus numerous, and they represent a considerable sum; but, after all, their chief object is to stimulate inventors and investigators along certain lines which would be of general benefit to trade and commerce and beneficial to humanity. — Harpers Weekly.