UNKNOWN GENIUS.

Taranaki Daily News, 14 February 1920, Page 9

UNKNOWN GENIUS.

MYSTERIES OF INVENTION. THE WORljys GREATEST MEN. * A Royal Commission has been trying w find out who invented the tank. Belore they came to close quarters with the question -Mr Winston Churchill told them that they would never find the answer. you want to honor the inventor yon must, like the Athenians, build an altar pi a u unknown god. That was Mr. Churchills notion; nobody invented the thing though the thing got itself invented. It reminds you, remarks a water m London Daily Telegraph, of the old lady who declined to believe that one man could have written "Domoey and Son," and persisted that "it must have took a power of men to put together Dombey." On this page it deserves to be recorded that among those bold spirits who claimed the parenthood or tiie Lanks was a woman. She "had ™+?tl„ aU i "1 !l Vision -" Whether that not t!?i w a reward or Hot we can- !' surely it is a title to our • ympathy. Let us hope she will have ~ Vl - l0 " S Witll SU( ' k a population. .put tins is a serious question. When you begin to think of the things which are really valuable to the world, how hiventn? th6re t0 ™ hich can P«t an inventor s name ? Clothes, for instance: "ffe n' e Book of Ge nesis, Adam and Eve together, and more or lc-ss simultaneously, invented clothes, but we o UoW J Vhethel ' tl,e mail or th o woman thought ot it first. Yet the point is interesting. Take a device oven Lre important than petticoats and breeches Who invented fire? That » U, taught men to make lire? in the eld myth 1 rometheus brought a spark down from heaven and got into a terrible row Vou will ra r tiollal ! 3ti = explanation 1 m w ho declare* that some fellow watched a 'storm rub two branches of trees together till thov V , a , r f e - Suppose that did give the hint, still we don't know who the inJ of iutro P'r WOr , M knoWs no'hmg ot its greatest men.' t0 be s,,re > that James Watt was the first man to make a steam engine work in a businesslike way and George htephenson the first to build I sound railroad. But these with all respect to the men who mad-' them, arc all built on other folk's work Who was it that found out that Sw"'•'v'"' tUlow to have the happv thought thnt hmgs would move ea'sily if you u them on wheels? All this seem* so awKr-rsstfas s®tvss>26sacovlri^nft'."' 1 t °, th!nk thßt th « 'li«covirid, of to-day and yesterday and th» day before have transformed the world Certainly it was a very different world had railways and tele<ranhv and motor-cars ami aeroplanes. aVail H e rest of it. But imagine a wori without a needle. For thousands « tons of thousands of veurs, the? tell us women have had needles, needles of mi yet needles did not gfow. Some rniiutuhoutr. thw v Tmgine a without thread. iVe make a <rreat fuss artifiT. 6 'n ky l°' k mkp over' tificial silk. But before real silk and flaX aiul auimal Binew were Inmif '"1? an<l women had to live VentionT t) V the greatest in " which f® Cr " contrivances,

The aeroplane, thev tell ug, to m-n lutmmse the ways of civilisation. What tL Tl Wc fflarvel at dtg of the first men who ventured into t'2i T r , about the first men wt ventured on the sea? Telegraphy is a ery wonderful invention, which ] las world a new unity. But with", out the compass men and women would You «»"? know \ the >* ''ad a world. ou can turn up the names of all the men who had a hand in our modern indentions, but nobody knows who thought hist of making a 1)oat or who fouml south Wh »° U!d a ' Ways te " and south. What is more, we have no not.on what those vanished inventors got for their pams. "Some there be whW. mve no memorial," and among Xm are all who did the great, pioneer work. iney may have had visions. But li! :f l ' o kn ™ the wo. man felt who first made a fire burn? a -nZn V a ', rl who first sowetl with hj• 7 a ? what shß 6aid afterwards when it broke? Down the ages you seefri to hear a complaint about the shocking bad stuff her husband was always brin"inv»nt me '+i, WaS the mftn in ff™eral the inventor, the innovator, the hopeful experimenter with novelties? Did the woman adopt them reluctantly, seeptie- • > WJ th good old-fashioned dislike of a new dodge? Or was primitive ma» a lazy rogue, like the noble savage as we Know him, lounging about while tlio women did the work and found out! Vow ways of making the fellow more eororartabls? There is some reason to be Jieve b«t. Tories, though you .canaot Believe that fcoth at once. Much pends how things are sola* at nome. *