CHAPTER III.
At the period of which I write the Yellow Creek Works, Dakota, had long enjoyed the primary rank as a School of Engineering. Founded about the year 1910, with the advantage of unlimited capital, it had been from the first the aim of the intelligent directors to organize invention. The idea was itself perhaps the most pregnant invention ever devised, and requires some slight exposition here. Up to a late period in the last century the inventive talent of the world had been content to act like the literary and scientific talent of an earlier date in a wholly desultory fashion. An ingenious artificer or mechanic engaged in a factory was content to make any improvement that might suggest itself to him in the machinery under his hands, provided he could obtain his employer's sanction to risking some expenditure, and could see his way to gaining some recompense for himself. His genius, however, was little en-
