Frank P. Bachman
Author of Great Inventors and Their Inventions (1918), a school reader that tells the story of the steam engine, the cotton gin, the telegraph, the telephone, and other inventions through the lives of the men who made them.
Biography
Frank Puterbaugh Bachman (1871 to 1934) was an American educator and school administrator. The title page of Great Inventors and Their Inventions (1918) describes him as formerly Professor of the Principles of Education at Ohio University and Assistant Superintendent of the Cleveland Public Schools.
Most of his published work was in school administration. He wrote Principles of Elementary Education and Their Application (1915) and Problems in Elementary School Administration (1915), a study applied to New York City, and was a joint author, with George D. Strayer, Ellwood P. Cubberley, and others, of Some Problems in City School Administration (1916). With Abraham Flexner he co-authored a series of school surveys for the General Education Board: Public Education in Maryland (1916), The Gary Schools (1918), and Public Education in Delaware (1919). A later study, Training and Certification of High School Teachers, appeared in 1930. He died on February 17, 1934.
Why Bachman Matters
Bachman was a school administrator by trade, and Great Inventors and Their Inventions is a schoolbook by design. It was published by the American Book Company, a major textbook publisher of the period, and it belongs to a class of reader that flourished in American classrooms in the early twentieth century: history taught through biography, and industrial history in particular taught through the lives of inventors.
The preface states the aim plainly. Each invention, Bachman writes, has added to the comforts of the world and brought new industries into being, so the stories offer an easy approach to understanding the origin of certain parts of our civilization. The story of each invention is interwoven with the life of its inventor, because the lives of inventors convey their own lessons on how big things are brought about and on the traits of mind and heart which make for success. The book's thirteen chapters move from James Watt and the steam engine through spinning machines, the cotton gin, the reaper, and Bessemer steel, to printing, the telegraph, the telephone, and a closing chapter on Edison, the Wright brothers, Marconi, and John P. Holland.
The book is also a record of how the Progressive Era explained its own industrial world to children: as a sequence of solvable problems, solved by patient individuals, whose reward was the visible transformation of daily life.