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Section 4
The latent energy of coal and the power of steam waited long on
the verge of discovery, before they began to influence human
lives.
There were no doubt many such devices as Hero's toys devised and
forgotten, time after time, in courts and palaces, but it needed
that coal should be mined and burning with plenty of iron at hand
before it dawned upon men that here was something more than a
curiosity. And it is to be remarked that the first recorded
suggestion for the use of steam was in war; there is an
Elizabethan pamphlet in which it is proposed to fire shot out of
corked iron bottles full of heated water. The mining of coal for
fuel, the smelting of iron upon a larger scale than men had ever
done before, the steam pumping engine, the steam-engine and the
steam-boat, followed one another in an order that had a kind of
logical necessity. It is the most interesting and instructive
chapter in the history of the human intelligence, the history of
steam from its begi
perfection of the great turbine engines that preceded the
utilisation of intra-molecular power. Nearly every human being
must have seen steam, seen it incuriously for many thousands of
years; the women in particular were always heating water, boiling
it, seeing it boil away, seeing the lids of vessels dance with
its fury; millions of people at different times must have watched
steam pitching rocks out of volcanoes like cricket balls and
blowing pumice into foam, and yet you may search the whole human
record through, letters, books, inscriptions, pictures, for any
glimmer of a realisation that here was force, here was strength
to borrow and use… Then suddenly man woke up to it, the
railways spread like a network over the globe, the ever enlarging
iron steamships began their staggering fight against wind and
wave.
Steam was the first-comer in the new powers, it was the begi
of the Age of Energy that was to close the long history of the
Warring States.
But for a long time men did not realise the importance of this
novelty. They would not recognise, they were not able to
recognise that anything fundamental had happened to their
immemorial necessities. They called the steam-engine the 'iron
horse' and pretended that they had made the most partial of
substitutions. Steam machinery and factory production were
visibly revolutionising the conditions of industrial production,
population was streaming steadily in from the country-side and
concentrating in hitherto unthought-of masses about a few city
centres, food was coming to them over enormous distances upon a
scale that made the one sole precedent, the corn ships of
imperial Rome, a petty incident; and a huge migration of peoples
between Europe and Western Asia and America was in Progress,
and-nobody seems to have realised that something new had come
into human life, a strange swirl different altogether from any
previous circling and mutation, a swirl like the swirl when at
last the lock gates begin to open after a long phase of
accumulating water and eddying inactivity…
The sober Englishman at the close of the nineteenth century could
sit at his breakfast-table, decide between tea from Ceylon or
coffee from Brazil, devour an egg from France with some Danish
ham, or eat a New Zealand chop, wind up his breakfast with a West
Indian banana, glance at the latest telegrams from all the world,
scrutinise the prices current of his geographically distributed
investments in South Africa, Japan, and Egypt, and tell the two
children he had begotten (in the place of his father's eight)
that he thought the world changed very little. They must play
cricket, keep their hair cut, go to the old school he had gone
to, shirk the lessons he had shirked, learn a few scraps of
Horace and Virgil and Homer for the confusion of cads, and all
would be well with them…
Section 5
Electricity, though it was perhaps the earlier of the two to be
studied, invaded the common life of men a few decades after the
exploitation of steam. To electricity also, in spite of its
provocative nearness all about him, mankind had been utterly
blind for incalculable ages. Could anything be more emphatic than
the appeal of electricity for attention? It thundered at man's
ears, it signalled to him in blinding flashes, occasionally it
killed him, and he could not see it as a thing that concerned him
enough to merit study. It came into the house with the cat on any
dry day and crackled insinuatingly whenever he stroked her fur.
It rotted his metals when he put them together… There is no
single record that any one questioned why the cat's fur crackles
or why hair is so unruly to brush on a frosty day, before the
sixteenth century. For endless years man seems to have done his
very successful best not to think about it at all; until this new
spirit of the Seeker turned itself to these things.
How often things must have been seen and dismissed as
unimportant, before the speculative eye and the moment of vision
came! It was Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth's court physician, who
first puzzled his brains with rubbed amber and bits of glass and
silk and shellac, and so began the quickening of the human mind
to the existence of this universal presence. And even then the
science of electricity remained a mere little group of curious
facts for nearly two hundred years, co
magnetism-a mere guess that-perhaps with the lightning. Frogs'
legs must have hung by copper hooks from iron railings and
twitched upon countless occasions before Galvani saw them.
Except for the lightning conductor, it was 250 years after
Gilbert before electricity stepped out of the cabinet of
scientific curiosities into the life of the common man… Then
suddenly, in the half-century between 1880 and 1930, it ousted
the steam-engine and took over traction, it ousted every other
form of household heating, abolished distance with the perfected