H. Wells: The World Set Free

before the world could use their findings for any but the

roughest, most obvious purposes. If man in general was not still

as absolutely blind to the unconquered energies about him as his

paleolithic precursor, he was at best purblind.

Section 4

The latent energy of coal and the power of steam waited long on

the verge of discovery, before they began to influencehuman

lives.

There were no doubtmany 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 beginning as a fact in human consciousnessto the

perfection of the great turbine engines that preceded the

utilisation of intra-molecular power. Nearly every human being

must have seensteam, seenit incuriously for many thousands of

years; the women in particular were always heating water, boiling

it, seeingit boil away, seeingthe 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 wokeup 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 beginning

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 conditionsof 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 thoughtthe 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 confusionof 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 seeit 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 thinkabout it at all; until this new

spiritof the Seeker turned itself to these things.

How often things must have been seenand 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 existenceof this universal presence. And even then the

science of electricity remained a mere little group of curious

facts for nearly two hundred years, connected perhaps with

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 sawthem.

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

formof household heating, abolished distance with the perfected

wireless telephone and the telephotograph…

Section 6

And there was an extraordinary mental resistance to discovery and

invention for at least a hundred years after the scientific

revolution had begun. Each new thing made its way into practice

against a scepticism that amounted at times to hostility. One

writer upon these subjects gives a funny little domestic

conversation that happened, he says, in the year 1898, within ten

years, that is to say, of the time when the first aviators were

fairly on the wing. He tells us how he sat at his desk in his

study and conversed with his little boy.

His little boy was in profound trouble. He felthe had to speak

very seriously to his father, and as he was a kindly little boy

he did not want to do it too harshly.

This is what happened.

'I wish, Daddy,' he said, coming to his point, 'that you wouldn't

write all this stuff about flying. The chaps rot me.'

'Yes!' said his father.

'And old Broomie, the Head I mean, he rots me. Everybody rots

me.'

'But there is going to be flying-quite soon.'

The little boy was too well bred to say what he thoughtof that.