All our fussing and fuming about little matters must end in time.
It is a comfort to feel sure that the time will come when
questions of wages, starvation, justice, supply and demand,
finance, and all the miserable worries of to-day, from
Presidential elections to the digging of sewers, will be things
of the past.
Had we been intended for such things exclusively, we might as
well have been put in a hole in the ground or in some cool corner
of Hades to fight out our troubles. We should not have needed
for our home a beautiful globe, swinging through endless space,
bathed in sunlight or blessed with the companionship of other
suns and planets whirling with us on mysterious errands.
Man's work of to-day--the fighting, the sweating, the starving,
the cheating and lying, the miserable births and the dull,
stupid, monotonous living--will end soon. Real HUMAN life
will dawn and end the period of savage life.
Control of nature's forces will supply every man with what he
needs to keep his body alive, his soul and his brain free from
care.
Then men will cease their animal lives, cease eating to live and
living to eat. They will live to think. The brain, which
differentiates them from the animals, will give the real interest
to their lives. Mental work--art, science and things worth
while--will occupy them. ----
Does it not seem probable that when the day of organized life
comes our chief interest will be the study of the universe--the
other worlds outside of our own?
The great man will be he whose genius shall cross interstellar
space as Columbus crossed the ocean. The great newspaper editor
will be the first to get a signed statement from Mars.
The discoverer of that day will get from some older planet
information millions of years ahead of our own.
As the dull mind of the field-plodder now looks toward the great
cities--toward the vast movement outside his own little life--so
shall men look away from this little, limited, but by that time
well regulated, planet, to the mysteries and the grandeurs of the
worlds outside.
Life will be complete in those coming days. Men will look back
with pity to the time when they quarreled about little metal
money tokens, locked each other up in jail, or choked each other
to death legally.
Let us hope and believe that we may come back then to share the
pleasure of the world's mature days, since we are sentenced to
exist here to-day in the greasy, clammy period of struggle and
half-bakedness. ----
While the infant sits drawing milk, with never a dream of solid
food, the teeth are growing beneath its gums. And while we crawl
around here now, with no conception of our future state, some of
the forces at work among us are preparing for the days when real
life shall begin. Among these forces you may count the
constructors of the great cosmic eye--the huge telescope that is
now building in Paris. Compared with all other exhibits at the
Paris Fair, that great instrument will be as a giant among
babies, a Corliss engine among children's toys.
It is the precursor of the great instruments which in the future
will take man on his travels through space. Imperfect as it is,
it fills the mind with awe and the imagination with delight.
----
Think of the great celestial eye, flint and crown glass lenses
more than four feet in diameter, weighing a ton, and suspended at
the end of a tube one hundred feet long! It will reach out
thousands of billions of miles into space, giving us, perhaps,
new secrets of the universe. Yet it is but a child's toy
compared to the instruments which must follow it.
And you who read this, if your mind is fresh and your imagination
not jaded, may be the man who shall add to the power of this
instrument as Galileo added to that given to the world by
Lippershey, the humble Dutchman.
We invite the young American of ambition to study this latest
proof of man's growing skill, and see whether he can imagine
anything to add to it. ----
"I have not seen it" say you. If you are the right man, you do
not need to SEE it. Galileo only HEARD of Lippershey's
discovery. He thought hard on the problems of refraction for one
night, and as a result produced a telescope capable of magnifying
threefold. He finally produced a telescope of thirty-two-fold
power.
This French telescope magnifies six thousand times, but it is
only a baby telescope, full of faults. It is rendered imperfect
by the wavy motion of the air, which affects our sight just as
the motion of the waves affects the sight of a fish. It lacks
any adequate arrangement for light supply. The great trouble of
the astronomer is the getting of more light in his telescopes.
You may be the man to tell him how to do it without adding to the
diameter of his object glass.
Anyhow, think about the big telescope. If it does not make you
an astronomer or a great inventor, it may stir up your brain to
the pitch of inventing a really good chicken coop. That is still
lacking, and in great demand.