science invent no more, or very little. Is it not striking, indeed, that the steam-engine, even in its leading principles, the railway-engine, the steamboat, the telephone, the phonograph, the weaving-machine, the lace-machine, the lighthouse, the macadamised road, photography, in black and in colours, and thousands, of less, important little things, have not been invented by professional men of science, although none of them would have refused to associate his name with any of the above-named inventions? Men who hardly had received any education at school, who had merely picked up the crumbs of knowledge from the tables of the rich, and who made their experiments with the most primitive means — the attorney’s clerk Smeaton, the instrument-maker Watt, the brakesman Stephenson, the jeweller’s apprentice Fulton, the millwright Rennie, the mason Telford, and hundreds of others whose very names remain unknown, were, as Mr. Smiles justly says, “the real makers of modern civilisation”; while the professional men of science, provided with all means for acquiring knowledge and experimenting, have invented little, in the formidable array of implements, machines, and prime-motors which has shown to humanity how to utilise and to manage the forces of nature.195 The fact is striking, but its explanation is very simple: those men — the Watts and the Stephensons — knew something which the savants do not know — they knew the use of their hands; their surroundings stimulated their inventive powers; they knew machines, their leading and their work; they had breathed the atmosphere of the workshop and the building-yard.
We know how men of science will meet the reproach. They will say: “We discover the laws of nature, let others apply them; it is a simple division of labour.” But such a rejoinder would be utterly untrue. The march of progress is quite the reverse, because in a hundred cases against one the mechanical invention comes before the discovery of the scientific law. It was not the dynamical theory of heat which came before the steam-engine — it followed it.