The Dominion in 1983 | Page 8

men of the time that the Canadians under arms, though
outnumbered trebly by the intending invaders, would have held their
own gallantly and have come off victorious.
The excitement aroused by these stirring occurrences began to quiet
down towards the approaching Fall, when the Canadian ship of state
was again under full sail, heading for the waters of prosperity. Since
then our political history has been so intimately connected with great
inventions and discoveries, that a narration of one without a description
of the other is scarcely possible.

II.

"For miracles are ceased; "And therefore we must needs admit the
means "How things are perfected." --Henry V, Act I.
It was well understood by the Romans in their palmy days that a great
empire could not be held together without means of easy
communication between distant provinces, and their fine hard roads
ramifying from Rome to the remote corners of Gaul or Dacia, testify to
their wisdom and enterprise in this respect. When Great Britain in the
eighteenth century, full of inventive skill, reared men who by means of
improved roads, well-bred horses and fine vehicles raised the rate of
travel to ten miles an hour from end to end of the kingdom, a great deal
of complacent satisfaction was indulged in over the advantages likely
to result from such rapid travelling. This great speed, however, was
made to appear quite slow in the first half of the nineteenth century
when locomotives were invented capable of covering sixty miles an
hour. Nowadays the old cumbrous locomotive, rumbling and puffing
along and making only sixty miles in sixty minutes, is a very dilatory
machine in comparison with our light and beautiful rocket cars, which
frequently dart through the air at the rate of sixty miles in one minute.
The advantages to a country like ours, over 3,000 miles wide, of swift
transit are obvious. The differences in sentiment, politically, nationally,
and morally, which arose aforetime when people under the same
government lived 3,000 miles apart have disappeared to be replaced by
a powerful unanimity that renders possible great social movements,
utterly impossible in the railway age, when seven days were consumed
in journeying from east to west. The old idea that balloons would be
used in this century for travelling has proved a delusion, almost their
only use now being a meteorological one.
Our rocket cars were only perfected in the usual slow course of
invention, and could neither have been constructed nor propelled a
hundred years ago, for neither was the metal of which they are
constructed produced, nor had the method of propulsion or even the
propulsive power been developed. Inventors had to wait till science had
given us in abundance a metal less than a quarter the weight of iron, but
as strong and durable, and this was not until some fifty years ago when
a process was discovered for producing cheaply the beautiful metal
calcium. But calcium would have been little use alone. Aluminium,
which is now so plentiful, had to be alloyed with it, and aluminium was

not used to any great extent till the beginning of this century, when an
electric process of reducing it quickly from its ore--common clay--was
discovered. The metal known as calcium bronze, which is now so
common, is an alloy of calcium, 0.75; aluminium, 0.20; and 0.05 of
other metals and metalloids in varying proportions according to
different patents. This alloy has all the useful properties of the finest
steel with about one-fourth its weight, and is besides perfectly
non-oxydisable and never tarnishes. Without the production of a metal
with all these combined qualities, we might still in our journeys, be
dawdling along at sixty miles an hour in a cumbrous railroad car behind
a snorting, screaming locomotive.
Our swiftly darting cars were not at first constructed on such perfect
principles as now. Invention seems to follow certain laws, and has to
take its time. A new discovery in physics has to be supplemented by
one in chemistry, and one in chemistry by another in physics, and so on
through a whole century, perhaps, before any great invention is
perfected. Thus it happens that, though the principle of the rocket has
been known for an age, it is only comparatively recently that it has
been applied to the propulsion of cars. An invention, too, always
presents itself to an inventor at first in the most complicated form, and
frequently many years are passed in attempts at simplification. What a
wide interval is there between the steam locomotive with all its
complex mechanism, and the magnificently simple rocket car! A
century of ceaseless invention is comprehended between the two!
Before the simplicity of our cars was arrived at, inventors had to give
up boilers, fire-boxes, valves, steam-pipes, cylinders, pistons, wheels,
cranks, levers,