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TWENTIETH CENTURY INVENTIONS
A Forecast
BY
GEORGE SUTHERLAND, M.A.
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK AND BOMBAY
1901
PREFACE.
Twenty years ago the author started a career in technological
journalism by writing descriptions of what he regarded as the most
promising inventions which had been displayed in international
exhibitions then recently held. From that time until the present it
has been his constant duty and practice to take note of the advance of
inventive science as applied to industrial improvement--to watch it as
an organic growth, not only from a philosophical, but also from a
practical, point of view. The advance towards the actual adoption of
any great industrial invention is generally a more or less collective
movement; and, in the course of a practice such as that referred to,
the habit of watching the signs of progress has been naturally
acquired.
Moreover, it has always been necessary to take a comprehensive, rather
than a minute or detailed, view of the progress of the great
industrial army of nineteenth century civilisation towards certain
objectives. It is better, for some purposes of technological
journalism, to be attached to the staff than to march with any
individual company--for the war correspondent must ever place himself
in a position from which a bird's-eye view is possible. The personal
aspect of the campaign becomes merged in that which regards the army
as an organic unit.
It may, therefore, be claimed that, in some moderate degree, the
author is fitted by training and opportunities for undertaking the
necessarily difficult task of foretelling the trend of invention and
industrial improvement during the twentieth century. He must, of
course, expect to be wrong in a certain proportion of his
prognostications; but, like the meteorologists, he will be content if
in a fair percentage of his forecasts it should be admitted that he
has reasoned correctly according to the available data.
The questions to be answered in an inquiry as to the chances of
failure or success which lie before any invention or proposed
improvement are, first, whether it is really wanted; and, secondly,
whether the environment in the midst of which it must make its debut
is favourable. These requirements generally depend upon matters which,
to a large extent, stand apart from the personal qualifications of any
individual inventor.
In the course of a search through the vast accumulations of the patent
specifications of various countries, the thought is almost
irresistibly forced upon the mind of the investigator that "there is
nothing new under the sun". No matter how far back he may push his
inquiry in attempting to unveil the true source of any important idea,
he will always find at some antecedent date the germ, either of the
same inventive conception, or of something which is hardly
distinguishable from it. The habit of research into the origin of
improved industrial method must therefore help to strengthen the
impression of the importance of gradual growth, and of general
tendencies, as being the prime factors in promoting social advancement
through the success of invention.
The same habit will also generally have the effect of rendering the
searcher more diffident in any claims which he may entertain as to
the originality of his own ideas. Inventive thought has been so
enormously stimulated during the past two or three generations, that
the public recognition of a want invariably sets thousands of minds
thinking about the possible methods of ministering to it.
Startling illustrations of this fact are continually cropping up in
the experiences of patent agents and others who are engaged in
technological work and its literature. The average inventor is almost
always inclined to imagine--when he finds another man working in
exactly the same groove as himself--that by some means his ideas have
leaked out, and have been pirated. But those who have studied
invention, as a social and industrial force, know that nothing is more
common than to find two or more inventors making entirely independent
progress in the same direction.
For example, while this book was in course of preparation the author
wrote out an account of an application of wireless telegraphy to the
purpose of keeping all the clocks within a given area correct to one
standard time. Within a few days there came to hand a copy of
_Engineering_ in which exactly the same suggestion was put forward,
and an announcement was made to the effect that Mr. Richard Kerr,
F.G.S., had been working independently on the same lines, the details
of his method of applying the Hertzian waves to the purpose being
practically the same as those sketched out by the author. This is only
one of several instances of coincidences in independent work which
have been noticed during the period while this volume was in course of
preparation.
It may, therefore, be readily understood that the author would hardly
like to undertake the task of attempting to discriminate between those
forecasts in the subsequent pages which are the results of his own
original suggestions, and those which have been derived from other
sources. Whatever is of value has in all probability been thought of,
or perhaps patented and otherwise publicly suggested, before. At any
rate, the great majority of the forecasts are based on actual records
of the trials of inventions which distinctly have a future lying
before them in the years of the twentieth century.
In declining to enter into questions relating to the original
authorship of the improvements or discoveries discussed, it should not
be supposed that any wish is implied to detract from the merits of
inventors and promoters of inventions, either individually or
collectively. Many of these are the heroes and statesmen of that great
nation which is gradually coming to be recognised as a true entity
under the name of Civilisation. Their life's work is to elevate
humanity, and if mankind paid more attention to them, and to what they
are thinking and doing, instead of setting so much store by the
veriest tittle-tattle of what is called political life, it would make
much faster progress.
Some of the industrial improvements referred to in the succeeding
pages are necessarily sketched in an indefinite manner. The outlines,
as it were, have been only roughed in; and no attempt has been made to
supply particulars, which in fact would be out of place in an essay
towards a comprehensive survey in so small a space. It is upon the
wise and skilful arrangement of details that sound and commercially
profitable patents are usually founded, rather than upon the broad
general principles of a proposed industrial advance or reform.
During the twentieth century this latter fact, already well recognised
by experts in what is known as industrial property, will doubtless
force itself more and more upon the attention of inventors. Every
specification will require to be drawn up with the very greatest care
in observing the truth taught by the fable of the boy and the jar of
nuts. So rapidly does the mass of bygone patent records accumulate,
that almost any kind of claim based upon very wide foundations will be
found to have trenched upon ground already in some degree taken up.
Probably there is hardly anything indicated in this work which is
not--in the strict sense of the rules laid down for examiners in those
countries which make search as to originality--common public property.
The labour involved in gathering the data for a forecast of the
inventions likely to produce important effects during the twentieth
century has been chiefly that of selecting from out of a vast mass of
heterogeneous ideas those which give promise of springing up amidst
favourable conditions and of growing to large proportions and bearing
valuable fruit. Such ideas, when planted in the soil of the collective
mind through the medium of official or other records, generally
require for their germination a longer time than that for which the
patent laws grant protection for industrial property. Many of them,
indeed, have formed the subjects of patents which, from one reason or
another, lapsed long before the expiration of the maximum terms.
Nature is ever prodigal of seeds and of "seed-thoughts" but
comparatively niggardly of places in which the young plant will find
exactly the kind of soil, air, rain, and sunshine which the young
plant needs.
If any one requires proof of this statement he will find ample
evidence in support of it in the tenth chapter of Smiles's work on
_Industrial Biography_, where facts and dates are adduced to show that
steam locomotion, reaping machines, balloons, gunpowder, macadamised
roads, coal gas, photography, anaesthesia, and even telegraphy are
inventions which, so far as concerns the germ idea on which their
success has been based, are of very much older origin than the world
generally supposes. The author, therefore, submits that he is
justified in referring inventions to the century in which they produce
successful results, not to that in which they may have been first
vaguely thought of. And in this view it is obvious that many of those
patents and suggestions which have been published in current
literature during the nineteenth century, but which, although pregnant
with mighty industrial influences, have not yet reached fruition, are
essentially inventions of the twentieth century. More than this, it is
extremely probable that the great majority of those ideas which will
move the industrial world during the next ensuing hundred years have
already been indicated, more or less clearly, by the inventive thought
of the nineteenth century.
GEORGE SUTHERLAND.
_December_, 1900.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
INVENTIVE PROGRESS 1
CHAPTER II.
NATURAL POWER 22
CHAPTER III.
STORAGE OF POWER 53
CHAPTER IV.
ARTIFICIAL POWER 72
CHAPTER V.
ROAD AND RAIL 91
CHAPTER VI.
SHIPS 122
CHAPTER VII.
AGRICULTURE 144
CHAPTER VIII.
MINING 167
CHAPTER IX.
DOMESTIC 195
CHAPTER X.
ELECTRIC MESSAGES, ETC. 216
CHAPTER XI.
WARFARE 233
CHAPTER XII.
MUSIC 249
CHAPTER XIII.
ART AND NEWS 264
CHAPTER XIV.
INVENTION AND COLLECTIVISM 276
CHAPTER I.
INVENTIVE PROGRESS.
The year 1801, the first of the nineteenth century, was _annus
mirabilis_ in the industrial history of mankind. It was in that year
that the railway locomotive was invented by Richard Trevithick, who
had studied the steam engine under a friend and assistant of James
Watt. His patent, which was secured during the ensuing year, makes
distinct mention of the use of his locomotive driven by steam upon
tramways; and in 1803 he actually had an engine running on the
Pen-y-Darran mining tramway in Cornwall. From that small beginning has
grown a system of railway communication which has brought the farthest
inland regions of mighty continents within easy reach of the seaboard
and of the world's great markets; which has made social and friendly
intercourse possible in millions of homes which otherwise would have
been almost destitute of it; which has been the means of spreading a
knowledge of literature, science and religion over the face of the
civilised world; and which, at the present moment, constitutes the
outward and visible sign of the difference between Western
civilisation and that of the Asiatic, as seen in China.
In another corner of the globe, during the year 1801, Volta was
constructing his first apparatus demonstrating the material and
physical nature of those mysterious electric currents which his friend
Professor Galvani of Bologna, who died just two years earlier, had at
first ascribed to a physiological source. The researches of the
latter, it will be remembered, were begun in an observation of the way
in which the legs of a dead frog twitched under certain conditions.
The voltaic pile was the first electric battery, and, therefore, the
parent of the existing marvellous telegraphic and telephonic systems,
while less immediately it led to the development of the dynamo and its
work in electric lighting and traction. It brought into harmony much
fragmentary knowledge which had lain disjointed in the armoury of the
physicist since Dufay in France and Franklin in America had
investigated their theories of positive and negative frictional
electricities, and had connected them with the flash of lightning as
seen in Nature. Thus it became a fresh starting point both for
industry and for science.
At the Exposition of National Industry, held in Paris during the year
1801, a working model of the Jacquard loom was exhibited--the
prototype of those remarkable pieces of mechanism by which the most
elaborately figured designs are worked upon fabrics during the process
of weaving by means of sets of perforated cardboards. This was the
crowning achievement of the inventions relating to textile fabrics,
which had rendered the latter half of the eighteenth century so
noteworthy in an industrial sense. It brought artistic designs in
articles of common use within the reach of even poor people, and has
been the means of unconsciously improving the public taste, in matters
of applied art, more rapidly than could have been accomplished by an
army of trained artists. The riots in which the mob nearly drowned
Jacquard at Lyons for attempting to set up some of his looms were very
nearly a counterpart of those which had occurred in England in
connection with the introduction of spinning, weaving and knitting
machinery.
In Paris, during the first year of the nineteenth century, Robert
Fulton, an American, and friend of the United States representative in
France, was making trials on the Seine with his first steam-boat--a
little vessel imitated by him later on in the first successful
steamers which plied on the river Hudson, carrying passengers from New
York. At the same time, William Symongton launched the _Charlotte
Dundas_, the steam tug-boat which, on the Scottish canals, did the
first actually useful work in the conveyance of goods by steam power
on the water. These small experiments have initiated a movement in
maritime transport which is fully comparable to that brought about on
land by the invention of the railway locomotive.
Again, in 1801, Sir Humphry Davy gave his first lecture at the Royal
Institution in London, where he had just been installed as a
professor, and began that long series of investigations into the
chemistry of common things which, taken up by his successor Faraday,
gave to the United Kingdom the first start in some of those industries
depending upon a knowledge of organic chemistry and the use of certain
essential oils.
Public attention at the beginning of the nineteenth century, however,
was directed anywhere but towards these small commencements of mighty
forces which were to revolutionise the industrial world, and through
it also the social and political. If in those days Cornwall was ever
referred to, it was not by any means in connection with Trevithick and
his steam-engine which would run on rails, but by way of reference to
the relations of the Prince of Wales to the Duchy, and the proportion
of its revenues which belonged to him from birth.
Glancing over the pages of any history compiled in the early half of
the century, the eye will trace hardly the barest allusions to forces,
the discoveries in which were, in the year 1801, still in the
incipient stage. Canon Hughes, for instance, in his continuation of
the histories of Hume and Smollett, devoted some forty pages to the
record of that year. The space which he could spare from the demands
made upon his attention by the wars in Spain and Egypt, and the naval
conflict with France, was mainly occupied with such matters as the
election of the Rev. Horne Tooke for Old Sarum, and the burning
question as to whether that gentleman had not rendered himself
permanently ineligible for Parliamentary honours through taking Holy
Orders, and with a miscellaneous mass of topics relating to the merely
evanescent politics of the day.
The whole of the effects of invention and discovery in making history
during the first year of the century were dismissed by this writer
with a casual reference to the augmentation of the productive power of
the labouring population through the use of machinery, and a footnote
stating that "this was more particularly the case in the cotton
manufacture".
Time corrects the historical perspective of the past, but it does not
very materially alter the power of the historical vision to adjust
itself to an examination of the present day forces which are likely to
grow to importance in the making of future history. When we ask what
are the inventions and discoveries which are really destined to grow
from seeds of the nineteenth into trees of the twentieth century, we
are at once confronted with the same kind of difficulty which would
present itself to one who, standing in the midst of an ancient forest,
should be requested to indicate in what spots the wide-spreading
giants of the next generation of trees might be expected to grow. The
company promoter labels those inventions in which he is commercially
interested as the affairs which will grow to huge dimensions in the
future; while the man of scientific or mechanical bent is very apt to
predict a mighty future only for achievements which strike him as
being peculiarly brilliant.
Patent experts, on the other hand, when asked by their clients to
state candidly what class of inventions may be relied upon to bring
the most certain returns, generally reply that "big money usually
comes from small patents". In other words, an invention embodying some
comparatively trivial, but yet really serviceable, improvement on a
very widely used type of machine; or a little bit of apparatus which
in some small degree facilitates some well known process; or a
fashionable toy or puzzle likely to have a good run for a season or
two, and then a moderate sale for a few years longer; these are the
things to be recommended to an inventor whose main object is to make
money. Thus the most qualified experts in patent law and practice do
not fail to disclose this fact to those who seek their professional
advice in a money-making spirit, as the great majority of inventors
do.
The full term of fourteen years in the United Kingdom, or seventeen in
the United States, may be a ridiculously long period for which to
grant a monopoly to the inventor of some ephemeral toy, although
absolutely inadequate to secure the just reward for one who labours
for many years to perfect an epoch-making invention, and then to
introduce it to the public in the face of all the opposition from
vested interests which such inventions almost invariably meet.
Thus the fact that a man has made money out of one class of patents
may not be any safe guide at all to arriving at a due estimate of his
ideas on industrial improvements of greater "pith and moment," but, on
the contrary, it is generally exactly the reverse. The law offers an
immense premium for such inventions as are readily introduced, and the
inventor who has made it his business to take advantage of this fact
is usually one of the last men from whom to get a trustworthy opinion
on patents of a different class.
Of the patents taken out during the latter portion of the nineteenth
century, many undoubtedly contain the germs of great ideas, and,
nevertheless, have excited comparatively little attention from
business men or from the general public. It was so in the latter part
of the eighteenth century, and history is only repeating itself when
the seeds of twentieth century industrial movements are permitted to
germinate unseen.
For all practical purposes each invention must be referred to the age
in which it actually does useful work in the service of mankind. Thus,
Hero of Alexandria, in the third century B.C., devised a water
fountain worked by the expansive power of steam. From time to time
during the succeeding twenty centuries similar pieces of apparatus
excited the curiosity of the inquisitive and the interest of the
learned. The clever and eccentric Marquis of Worcester, in his little
book published in 1663, _A Century of the Names and Scantlings of
Inventions_, generally known as the _Century of Inventions_, gave an
account of one application of the power of steam to lift water which
he had worked out, probably on a scale large enough to have become of
practical service. Thomas Savery and Denis Papin, both of them men of
high attainments and great ingenuity, made important improvements
before the end of the seventeenth century.
Yet, if we refer to the question as to the proper age to which the
steam-engine as a useful invention is to be assigned, we shall
unhesitatingly speak of it as an eighteenth century invention, and
this notwithstanding the fact that Savery's patent for the first
pumping engine which came into practical use was dated 1698. The real
introduction of steam as a factor in man's daily work was effected
later on, partly by Savery himself and partly by Newcomen, and above
all by James Watt. The expiration of Watt's vital patent occurred in
1800, and he himself then retired from the active supervision of his
engineering business, having virtually finished his great life's work
on the last year of the century which he had marked for all time by
the efforts of his genius.
Similarly we may confidently characterise the locomotive engine as an
invention belonging to the first half of the nineteenth century,
although tramways on the one hand, and steam-engines on the other
hand, were ready for the application of steam transport, and the only
work that remained to be accomplished in the half century indicated
was the bringing of the two things together. The dynamo, as a factor
in human life--or, in other words, the electric current as a form of
energy producing power and light--is an invention of the second half
of the nineteenth century, although the main principles upon which it
was built were worked out prior to the year 1851.
It will be seen, in the course of the subsequent pages, that portable
electric power has as yet won its way only into very up-to-date
workshops and mines, and that the means by which it will be applied to
numerous useful purposes in the field, the road, and the house will be
distinctly inventions of the twentieth century. Similarly the
steam-engine has not really been placed upon the ordinary road,
although efforts have been made for more than a century to put it
there, the conception of a road locomotive being, in fact, an earlier
one than that of an engine running on rails. Steam automobiles and
traction engines are still confined to special purposes, the natures
of which prove that certain elements of adaptability are still lacking
in order to render them universally useful as are the locomotive and
the steam-ship.
In nearly every other important line of human needs and desires it
will be found that merely tentative efforts have been made by
ingenious minds resulting in inventions of greater or less promise.
Many of the finest conceptions which have necessarily been set down as
failures have missed fulfilling their intended missions, not so much
by reason of inherent weakness, as through the want of accessory
circumstances to assist them. As in biology, so in industrial progress
the definition of fitness appended to the law of the survival of the
fittest must have reference to the environment.
A foolish law or public prejudice results in the temporary failure of
a great invention, and the inventor's patent succumbs to the
inexorable operation of the struggle for existence. Yet, fortunately
for mankind, if not for the individual inventor, an idea does not
suffer extinction as the penalty for non-success in the struggle. "The
beginning of creation," says Carlyle, "is light," and the kind of
light which inventors throw upon the dark problems involving man's
industrial progress is providentially indestructible.
Twentieth century inventions--as the term is used in this book--are,
therefore, those which are destined to fulfil their missions during
the ensuing hundred years. They are those whose light will not only
exist in hidden places, but will also shine abroad to help and to
bless mankind. Or, if we may revert to the former figure, they are
those which have not only been planted in the seed and have germinated
in the leaf, but which have grown to goodly proportions, so that none
may dare to assert that they have been planted for nought. A man's age
is the age in which he does his work rather than that in which he
struggles to years of maturity. Moore and Byron were poets of the
nineteenth century, although the one had attained to manhood and the
other had grown from poverty to inherit a peerage before the new
century dawned.
The prophetic role--although proverbially an unsafe one--is
nevertheless one which every business man must play almost every day
of his life. The merchant, the manufacturer, the publisher, the
director, the manager, and even the artist, must perforce stake some
portion of his success in life upon the chance of his forecast as to
the success of a particular speculation, article of manufacture, or
artistic conception, and its prospects of proving as attractive or
remunerative as he has expected it to be. The successful business man
no doubt makes his plans, as far as may be practicable, upon the
system indicated by the humorist, who advises people never to prophesy
unless they happen to know, but the nature of his knowledge is almost
always to some extent removed from certainty. He may spend much time
in laborious searching; make many inquiries from persons whom he
believes to be competent to advise him; diligently study the
conditions upon which the problem before him depends--in short, he may
take every reasonable precaution against the chances of failure, yet,
in spite of all, he must necessarily incur risks. And so it is with
regard to the task of forecasting the trend of industrial improvement.
All who are called upon to lay their plans for a number of years
beforehand must necessarily be deeply interested in the problems
relating to the various directions which the course of that
improvement may possibly take. Meanwhile their estimates of the
future, although based upon an intimate knowledge of the past and
aided by naturally clear powers of insight, must be hypothetical and
conditional. Unfortunately for the vast majority of manufacturing
experts, the thoroughness with which they have mastered the details of
one particular branch of industry too often blinds them to the chances
of change arising from localities beyond their own restricted fields
of vision.
The merriment occasioned by the first proposals for affixing pneumatic
tyres to bicycles may be cited as a striking instance of the lack of
forecasting insight displayed by very many of those who are best
entitled to pronounce opinions on the minutiae of their particular
avocations. In almost every "bike" shop and factory throughout the
United Kingdom and America, the suggestion of putting an air-filled
hosepipe around each wheel of the machine to act as a tyre was
received with shouts of ridicule!
Railway men, who understood the wonderful elasticity imparted by air
to pieces of mechanism, such as the pneumatic brake, were not by any
means so much inclined to laughter; but naturally, for the most part,
they deferred to the rule which enjoins every man to stick to his
trade. The rule in question--when applied to the task of estimating
the worth of inventions claiming to produce revolutionary effects in
any industry--is necessarily, in the majority of cases, more or less
irrelevant, because such an invention should be regarded not so much
as a proposed _innovation_ in an old trade as the _creation_ of a new
one.
George Stephenson's ideas on the transport of passengers and goods
were almost unanimously condemned by the experts of his day who were
engaged in that line of business. On points relating to wheels of
waggons and the harness of horses, the opinions of these men were
probably worth something; but in relation to steam locomotives,
carriages and trucks running upon rails, their judgment was not merely
worthless, but a good deal worse; it was indeed actually misleading,
because based on a pretence of knowledge of a trade which was to be
called into existence to compete with their own. "Great is Diana of
the Ephesians" said the artificers of old; and on the strength of
their expert knowledge in the making of idols they set themselves up
as judges of systems of theology and morality. The argument, although
based on self-interest subjectively, was nevertheless intended to
carry weight even among persons who wished to judge the questions in
dispute according to their merits, and most of the latter were only
too ready to accept the implied dictum that men who work about a
temple must be experts in theology! The principles upon which Royal
Commissions and Select Committees are sometimes appointed and
entrusted with the onerous duty of deciding upon far-reaching
industrial problems, affecting the progress of trade and manufactures
in the present day, involve exactly the same kind of fallacy. Men are
selected to pronounce judgment upon the proposals of their rivals in
trade, and narrow-minded specialists to give their opinions upon
projects which essentially belong to the border lands between two or
more branches of industry, and cannot be understood by persons not
possessing a knowledge of both.
Yet the world's work goes on apace; and as capital is accumulated and
seeks to find new outlets the multiplication of industrial projects
must continue in spite of every discouragement. This process will go
on at a rate even faster than that which was exhibited at the
beginning of the nineteenth century; but in watching the course of
advancement, the world must take count of ideas rather than of the
names of those who may have claims to rank as the originators of
ideas. While for purposes of convenience, history labels certain great
inventive movements, each with the name of one pre-eminent individual
who has contributed largely to its success, nothing like a due
appraisement of the services rendered by other men is ever attempted.
It is not even as if the commanding general should by public
acclamation receive all the applause for a successful campaign to the
exclusion of his lieutenants. The pioneers in each great department of
invention have generally acted as forerunners of the men whose names
have become the most famous. They have borne much of the heat and
burden of the day, while their successors have reaped the fruits of
triumph. Mr. Herbert Spencer's strong protest against the part
assigned by some writers in the mental and industrial evolution of the
human race to the influence of great men is certainly fully justified,
if the attribute of greatness is to be ascribed only to those whose
names figure in current histories. The parts performed by others,
whose fate it may have been to have fallen into comparatively
unfavourable environments, may have entitled them even more eminently
to the acclamation of greatness.
The world in such a matter asks, reasonably enough under the
circumstances, Shall we omit to honour any of the great men who have
played important parts in an industrial movement, assigning as our
motive the difficulty of enumerating so many names? For the
encouragement of those to whom the ambition for fame acts as a great
stimulus to self-devotion in the interests of human progress, it is
unavoidable that some men should be singled out and made heroes, while
the much more numerous class of those who have also done great work,
but who have not been quite so successful, must pass out of the ken of
all, excepting the few who possess an expert knowledge of the various
subjects which they have taken in hand.
Still the distortion to which history has been subjected through its
biographical mode of treatment must always be reckoned with as a
factor of possible error by any one attempting to read the riddle of
the past, and it may offer a still more dangerous snare to one who
tries to deduce the future course of events from the evidences of the
past, and the promises which they hold out. People are naturally prone
to take it for granted that the world's progress during the first part
of the twentieth century depends upon the future work of those
inventors and industrial promoters whose names have become most
famous during the latter half of the nineteenth. But this personal
treatment of the subject will be found to be in the last degree
unsatisfactory, when judged in the light both of past experience and
of some of the utterances of those eminent inventors who have tried to
forecast the future in their own particular lines of research.
If, therefore, we look at the whole subject from the entirely
impersonal point of view, and face the task of forecasting the
progress of industry during the twentieth century, in this aspect we
shall find that we have entered upon a chapter in the evolution of the
human race--dealing, in fact, with a branch of anthropology. We see
certain industrial and inventive forces at work, producing certain
initial effects, but plainly, as yet, falling immeasurably short of an
entire fulfilment of their possibilities; setting to work a multitude
of busy brains, planning and arranging, and gradually preparing the
minds of the more apathetic portion of humanity for the reception of
new ideas and the adoption of improved methods of life and of work.
Whither is it all tending? Will the twentieth century bring about as
great a change upon the earth--man's habitat--as the nineteenth did?
Or have the possibilities of really great and effective industrial
revolutions been practically exhausted? The belief impressed upon the
Author's mind, by facts and considerations evoked during the
collection of materials for this book, is that the march of industrial
progress is only just beginning, and that the twentieth century will
witness a far greater development than the nineteenth has seen.
The great majority of mankind still require to be released from the
drudgery of irksome, physical exertion, which, when power has been
cheapened, will be seen to be to a very large extent avoidable.
Pleasurable exercise will be substituted for the monotonous, manual
labour which, while it continues, generally precludes the possibility
of mental improvement. Hygienic science will insist more strenuously
than ever upon the great truth that, in order to be really serviceable
in promoting the health of mind and body, physical exertion must be in
some degree exhilarating, and the bad old practice of "all work and no
play," which was based upon the assumption that a boy can get as much
good out of chopping wood for an hour as out of a bicycle ride or a
game of cricket, will be relegated to the limbo of exploded fallacies.
The race, as a whole, will be athletic in the same sense in which
cultured ladies and gentlemen are at present. It will, a century
hence, offer a still more striking contrast to the existing state of
the Chinese, who bandage their women's feet in order to show that they
are high born and never needed to walk or to exert themselves!--the
assumption being that no one would ever move a muscle unless under
fear of the lash of poverty or of actual hunger. The farther Western
civilisation travels from that effete Eastern ideal, the greater will
be the hope for human progress in physical, mental and moral
well-being.