[1] In the earlier papers, of which this is the first, attention will be
given to the probable development of the civilized community in general.
Afterwards these generalizations will be modified in accordance with
certain broad differences of race, custom, and religion.
[2] Of quite serious forecasts and inductions of things to come, the
number is very small indeed; a suggestion or so of Mr. Herbert
Spencer's, Mr. Kidd's _Social Evolution_, some hints from Mr. Archdall
Reid, some political forecasts, German for the most part (Hartmann's
_Earth in the Twentieth Century_, e.g.), some incidental forecasts by
Professor Langley (_Century Magazine_, December, 1884, e.g.), and such
isolated computations as Professor Crookes' wheat warning, and the
various estimates of our coal supply, make almost a complete
bibliography. Of fiction, of course, there is abundance: _Stories of the
Year_ 2000, and _Battles of Dorking_, and the like--I learn from Mr.
Peddie, the bibliographer, over one hundred pamphlets and books of that
description. But from its very nature, and I am writing with the
intimacy of one who has tried, fiction can never be satisfactory in this
application. Fiction is necessarily concrete and definite; it permits of
no open alternatives; its aim of illusion prevents a proper amplitude of
demonstration, and modern prophecy should be, one submits, a branch of
speculation, and should follow with all decorum the scientific method.
The very form of fiction carries with it something of disavowal; indeed,
very much of the Fiction of the Future pretty frankly abandons the
prophetic altogether, and becomes polemical, cautionary, or idealistic,
and a mere footnote and commentary to our present discontents.
[3] It might have been used in the same way in Italy in the first
century, had not the grandiose taste for aqueducts prevailed.
[4] And also into the Cornwall mines, be it noted.
[5] It might be worse. If the biggest horses had been Shetland ponies,
we should be travelling now in railway carriages to hold two each side
at a maximum speed of perhaps twenty miles an hour. There is hardly any
reason, beyond this tradition of the horse, why the railway carriage
should not be even nine or ten feet wide, the width, that is, of the
smallest room in which people can live in comfort, hung on such springs
and wheels as would effectually destroy all vibration, and furnished
with all the equipment of comfortable chambers.
[6] Explosives as a motive power were first attempted by Huyghens and
one or two others in the seventeenth century, and, just as with the
turbine type of apparatus, it was probably the impetus given to the
development of steam by the convenient collocation of coal and water and
the need of an engine, that arrested the advance of this parallel
inquiry until our own time. Explosive engines, in which gas and
petroleum are employed, are now abundant, but for all that we can regard
the explosive engine as still in its experimental stages. So far,
research in explosives has been directed chiefly to the possibilities of
higher and still higher explosives for use in war, the neglect of the
mechanical application of this class of substance being largely due to
the fact, that chemists are not as a rule engineers, nor engineers
chemists. But an easily portable substance, the decomposition of which
would evolve energy, or--what is, from the practical point of view, much
the same thing--an easily portable substance, which could be decomposed
electrically by wind or water power, and which would then recombine and
supply force, either in intermittent thrusts at a piston, or as an
electric current, would be infinitely more convenient for all locomotive
purposes than the cumbersome bunkers and boilers required by steam. The
presumption is altogether in favour of the possibility of such
substances. Their advent will be the beginning of the end for steam
traction on land and of the steam ship at sea: the end indeed of the Age
of Coal and Steam. And even with regard to steam there may be a curious
change of method before the end. It is beginning to appear that, after
all, the piston and cylinder type of engine is, for locomotive
purposes--on water at least, if not on land--by no means the most
perfect. Another, and fundamentally different type, the turbine type, in
which the impulse of the steam spins a wheel instead of shoving a
piston, would appear to be altogether better than the adapted pumping
engine, at any rate, for the purposes of steam navigation. Hero, of
Alexandria, describes an elementary form of such an engine, and the
early experimenters of the seventeenth century tried and abandoned the
rotary principle. It was not adapted to pumping, and pumping was the
only application that then offered sufficient immediate encouragement to
persistence. The thing marked time for quite two centuries and a half,
therefore, while the piston engines perfected themselves; and only in
the eighties did the requirements of the dynamo-electric machine open a
"practicable" way of advance. The motors of the dynamo-electric machine
in the nineteenth century, in fact, played exactly the _rôle_ of the
pumping engine in the eighteenth, and by 1894 so many difficulties of
detail had been settled, that a syndicate of capitalists and scientific
men could face the construction of an experimental ship. This ship, the
_Turbinia_, after a considerable amount of trial and modification,
attained the unprecedented speed of 34½ knots an hour, and His Majesty's
navy has possessed, in the _Turbinia's_ younger and greater sister, the
_Viper_, now unhappily lost, a torpedo-destroyer capable of 41 miles an
hour. There can be little doubt that the sea speeds of 50 and even 60
miles an hour will be attained within the next few years. But I do not
think that these developments will do more than delay the advent of the
"explosive" or "storage of force" engine.
[7] The historian of the future, writing about the nineteenth century,
will, I sometimes fancy, find a new meaning in a familiar phrase. It is
the custom to call this the most "Democratic" age the world has ever
seen, and most of us are beguiled by the etymological contrast, and the
memory of certain legislative revolutions, to oppose one form of
stupidity prevailing to another, and to fancy we mean the opposite to an
"Aristocratic" period. But indeed we do not. So far as that political
point goes, the Chinaman has always been infinitely more democratic than
the European. But the world, by a series of gradations into error, has
come to use "Democratic" as a substitute for "Wholesale," and as an
opposite to "Individual," without realizing the shifted application at
all. Thereby old "Aristocracy," the organization of society for the
glory and preservation of the Select Dull, gets to a flavour even of
freedom. When the historian of the future speaks of the past century as
a Democratic century, he will have in mind, more than anything else, the
unprecedented fact that we seemed to do everything in heaps--we read in
epidemics; clothed ourselves, all over the world, in identical fashions;
built and furnished our houses in stereo designs; and travelled--that
naturally most individual proceeding--in bales. To make the railway
train a perfect symbol of our times, it should be presented as
uncomfortably full in the third class--a few passengers standing--and
everybody reading the current number either of the _Daily Mail_,
_Pearson's Weekly_, _Answers_, _Tit Bits_, or whatever Greatest Novel of
the Century happened to be going.... But, as I hope to make clearer in
my later papers, this "Democracy," or Wholesale method of living, like
the railways, is transient--a first makeshift development of a great and
finally (to me at least) quite hopeful social reorganization.
[8] So we begin to see the possibility of laying that phantom horse that
haunts the railways to this day so disastrously.
[9] A correspondent, Mr. Rudolf Cyrian, writes to correct me here, and I
cannot do better, I think, than thank him and quote what he says. "It is
hardly right to state that fifty miles an hour 'is the limit of our
speed for land travel, so far as existing conditions go.' As far as
English traffic is concerned, the statement is approximately correct. In
the United States, however, there are several trains running now which
average over considerable distances more than sixty miles an hour,
stoppages included, nor is there much reason why this should not be
considerably increased. What especially hampers the development of
railways in England--as compared with other countries--is the fact that
the rolling-stock templet is too small. Hence carriages in England have
to be narrower and lower than carriages in the United States, although
both run on the same standard gauge (4 feet 8½ inches). The result is
that several things which you describe as not possible at present, such
as to 'write smoothly and easily at a steady table, read papers, have
one's hair cut, and dine in comfort,' are not only feasible, but
actually attained on some of the good American trains. For instance, on
the _present_ Empire State Express, running between New York and
Buffalo, or on the _present_ Pennsylvania, Limited, running between New
York and Chicago, and on others. With the Pennsylvania, Limited, travel
stenographers and typewriters, whose services are placed at the disposal
of passengers free of charge. But the train on which there is the least
vibration of any is probably the new Empire State Express, and on this
it is certainly possible to write smoothly and easily at a steady
table."
[10] Since this appeared in the _Fortnightly Review_ I have had the
pleasure of reading 'Twentieth Century Inventions,' by Mr. George
Sutherland, and I find very much else of interest bearing on these
questions--the happy suggestion (for the ferry transits, at any rate) of
a rail along the sea bottom, which would serve as a guide to swift
submarine vessels, out of reach of all that superficial "motion" that is
so distressing, and of all possibilities of collision.
[11] To the level of such upper story pavements as Sir F. Bramwell has
proposed for the new Holborn to Strand Street, for example.
[12] I have said nothing in this chapter, devoted to locomotion, of the
coming invention of flying. This is from no disbelief in its final
practicability, nor from any disregard of the new influences it will
bring to bear upon mankind. But I do not think it at all probable that
aeronautics will ever come into play as a serious modification of
transport and communication--the main question here under consideration.
Man is not, for example, an albatross, but a land biped, with a
considerable disposition towards being made sick and giddy by unusual
motions, and however he soars he must come to earth to live. We must
build our picture of the future from the ground upward; of flying--in
its place.