H. Wells - The World Set Free

'Anyhow,' he said, 'I wish you wouldn't write about it.'

'You'll fly-lots of times-before you die,' the father assured

him.

The little boy looked unhappy.

The father hesitated. Then he opened a drawer and took out a

blurred and under-developed photograph. 'Come and look at this,'

he said.

The little boy came round to him. The photograph showed a stream

and a meadow beyond, and some trees, and in the air a black,

pencil-like objectwith flat wings on either side of it. It was

the first record of the first apparatus heavier than air that

ever maintained itself in the air by mechanical force. Across the

margin was written: 'Here we go up, up, up-from S. P. Langley,

Smithsonian Institution, Washington.'

The father watched the effectof this reassuring document upon

his son. 'Well?' he said.

'That,' said the schoolboy, after reflection, 'is only a model.'

'Model to-day, man to-morrow.'

The boy seemed divided in his allegiance. Then he decided for

what he believed quite firmly to be omniscience. 'But old

Broomie,' he said, 'he told all the boys in his class only

yesterday, "no man will ever fly." No one, he says, who has ever

shot grouse or pheasants on the wing would ever believe anything

of the sort…'

Yet that boy lived to fly across the Atlantic and edit his

father's reminiscences.

Section 7

At the close of the nineteenth century as a multitude of passages

in the literature of that time witness, it was thoughtthat the

fact that man had at last had successful and profitable dealings

with the steam that scalded him and the electricity that flashed

and banged about the sky at him, was an amazing and perhaps a

culminating exercise of his intelligence and his intellectual

courage. The air of 'Nunc Dimittis' sounds in same of these

writings. 'The great things are discovered,' wrote Gerald Brown

in his summary of the nineteenth century. 'For us there remains

little but the working out of detail.' The spiritof the seeker

was still rare in the world; education was unskilled,

unstimulating, scholarly, and but little valued, and few people

even then could have realised that Science was still but the

flimsiest of trial sketches and discovery scarcely beginning. No

one seems to have been afraid of science and its possibilities.

Yet now where there had been but a score or so of seekers, there

were many thousands, and for one needle of speculation that had

been probing the curtain of appearances in 1800, there were now

hundreds. And already Chemistry, which had been content with her

atoms and molecules for the better part of a century, was

preparing herselffor that vast next stride that was to

revolutionise the whole life of man from top to bottom.

One realises how crude was the science of that time when one

considers the case of the composition of air. This was

determined by that strange genius and recluse, that man of

mystery, that disembowelled intelligence, Henry Cavendish,

towards the end of the eighteenth century. So far as he was

concerned the work was admirably done. He separated all the known

ingredients of the air with a precision altogether remarkable; he

even put it upon record that he had some doubtabout the purity

of the nitrogen. For more than a hundred years his determination

was repeated by chemists all the world over, his apparatus was

treasured in London, he became, as they used to say, 'classic,'

and always, at every one of the innumerable repetitions of his

experiment, that sly element argon was hiding among the nitrogen

(and with a little helium and traces of other substances, and

indeed all the hints that might have led to the new departures of

the twentieth-century chemistry), and every time it slipped

unobserved through the professorial fingers that repeated his

procedure.

Is it any wonder then with this margin of inaccuracy, that up to

the very dawn of the twentieth-century scientific discovery was

still rather a procession of happyaccidents than an orderly

conquest of nature?

Yet the spiritof seeking was spreading steadily through the

world. Even the schoolmaster could not check it. For the mere

handful who grewup to feelwonder and curiosity about the

secrets of nature in the nineteenth century, there were now, at

the beginning of the twentieth, myriads escaping from the

limitations of intellectual routine and the habitual life, in

Europe, in America, North and South, in Japan, in China, and all

about the world.

It was in 1910 that the parents of young Holsten, who was to be

called by a whole generation of scientific men, 'the greatest of

European chemists,' were staying in a villa near Santo Domenico,

between Fiesole and Florence. He was then only fifteen, but he

was already distinguished as a mathematician and possessed by a

savage appetite to understand. He had been particularly attracted

by the mystery of phosphorescence and its apparent unrelatedness

to every other source of light. He was to tell afterwards in his

reminiscences how he watched the fireflies drifting and glowing

among the dark trees in the garden of the villa under the warm

blue night sky of Italy; how he caught and kept them in cages,

dissected them, first studying the general anatomy of insects

very elaborately, and how he began to experiment with the effect

of various gases and varying temperature upon their light. Then

the chance present of a little scientific toy invented by Sir

William Crookes, a toy called the spinthariscope, on which radium

particles impinge upon sulphide of zinc and make it luminous,

induced him to associate the two sets of phenomena. It was a

happyassociation for his inquiries. It was a rare and fortunate

thing, too, that any one with the mathematical gift should have

been taken by these curiosities.

Section 8

And while the boy Holsten was mooning over his fireflies at

Fiesole, a certain professor of physics named Rufus was giving a

course of afternoon lectures upon Radium and Radio-Activity in

Edinburgh. They were lectures that had attracted a very

considerable amount of attention. He gave them in a small

lecture-theatre that had become more and more congested as his

course proceeded. At his concluding discussion it was crowded

right up to the ceiling at the back, and there people were

standing, standing without any sense of fatigue, so fascinating

did they find his suggestions. One youngster in particular, a

chuckle-headed, scrub-haired lad from the Highlands, sat hugging

his knee with great sand-red hands and drinking in every word,

eyes aglow, cheeks flushed, and ears burning.

'And so,' said the professor, 'we seethat this Radium, which

seemed at first a fantastic exception, a mad inversion of all

that was most established and fundamental in the constitution of

matter, is reallyat one with the restof the elements. It does

noticeably and forcibly what probably all the other elements are

doing with an imperceptible slowness. It is like the single

voice crying aloud that betrays the silent breathing multitude in

the darkness. Radium is an element that is breaking up and flying

to pieces. But perhaps all elements are doing that at less

perceptiblerates. Uranium certainly is; thorium-the stuff of

this incandescent gas mantle-certainly is; actinium. I feel

that we are but beginning the list. And we knownow that the