It was writing
upon a tablet that is like a bastard-file, with a steel-pointed stylus.
Each slight projection makes a hole in the paper, and then the stencil
idea begins again.
Something has been previously said of the difficulties attending the
making of the filament for the incandescent light. It is a little thing,
smaller than a thread, frail, delicate, sealed in a bulb almost
absolutely exhausted of air, smooth without a flaw, of absolutely even
caliber from end to end. The world was searched for substances out of
which to make it, and experiments were endlessly and tediously tried;
all for this one little part of a great invention, which, like all other
inventions, would be valueless in the want of a single little part.
There are hundreds, an unknown number, of inventions in electricity in
this country whose authors are unknown, and will never be known to the
general public. The patent office shows many thousands of such in the
aggregate. Many useful improvements in the telephone alone have come
under the eye of every casual reader of the newspapers.
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