The World Set Free | Page 6

men had ever done before, the steam pumping engine, the
steam-engine and the steam-boat, followed one another in an order that had a kind of
logical necessity. It is the most interesting and instructive chapter in the history of the
human intelligence, the history of steam from its beginning as a fact in human
consciousness to the perfection of the great turbine engines that preceded the utilisation
of intra-molecular power. Nearly every human being must have seen steam, seen it
incuriously for many thousands of years; the women in particular were always heating
water, boiling it, seeing it boil away, seeing the lids of vessels dance with its fury;
millions of people at different times must have watched steam pitching rocks out of
volcanoes like cricket balls and blowing pumice into foam, and yet you may search the
whole human record through, letters, books, inscriptions, pictures, for any glimmer of a
realisation that here was force, here was strength to borrow and use.... Then suddenly
man woke up to it, the railways spread like a network over the globe, the ever enlarging
iron steamships began their staggering fight against wind and wave.
Steam was the first-comer in the new powers, it was the beginning of the Age of Energy
that was to close the long history of the Warring States.
But for a long time men did not realise the importance of this novelty. They would not
recognise, they were not able to recognise that anything fundamental had happened to
their immemorial necessities. They called the steam-engine the 'iron horse' and pretended
that they had made the most partial of substitutions. Steam machinery and factory
production were visibly revolutionising the conditions of industrial production,
population was streaming steadily in from the country-side and concentrating in hitherto
unthought-of masses about a few city centres, food was coming to them over enormous
distances upon a scale that made the one sole precedent, the corn ships of imperial Rome,
a petty incident; and a huge migration of peoples between Europe and Western Asia and
America was in Progress, and--nobody seems to have realised that something new had
come into human life, a strange swirl different altogether from any previous circling and
mutation, a swirl like the swirl when at last the lock gates begin to open after a long
phase of accumulating water and eddying inactivity....
The sober Englishman at the close of the nineteenth century could sit at his
breakfast-table, decide between tea from Ceylon or coffee from Brazil, devour an egg
from France with some Danish ham, or eat a New Zealand chop, wind up his breakfast
with a West Indian banana, glance at the latest telegrams from all the world, scrutinise
the prices current of his geographically distributed investments in South Africa, Japan,
and Egypt, and tell the two children he had begotten (in the place of his father's eight)
that he thought the world changed very little. They must play cricket, keep their hair cut,
go to the old school he had gone to, shirk the lessons he had shirked, learn a few scraps of
Horace and Virgil and Homer for the confusion of cads, and all would be well with
them....
Section 5
Electricity, though it was perhaps the earlier of the two to be studied, invaded the
common life of men a few decades after the exploitation of steam. To electricity also, in

spite of its provocative nearness all about him, mankind had been utterly blind for
incalculable ages. Could anything be more emphatic than the appeal of electricity for
attention? It thundered at man's ears, it signalled to him in blinding flashes, occasionally
it killed him, and he could not see it as a thing that concerned him enough to merit study.
It came into the house with the cat on any dry day and crackled insinuatingly whenever
he stroked her fur. It rotted his metals when he put them together.... There is no single
record that any one questioned why the cat's fur crackles or why hair is so unruly to brush
on a frosty day, before the sixteenth century. For endless years man seems to have done
his very successful best not to think about it at all; until this new spirit of the Seeker
turned itself to these things.
How often things must have been seen and dismissed as unimportant, before the
speculative eye and the moment of vision came! It was Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth's court
physician, who first puzzled his brains with rubbed amber and bits of glass and silk and
shellac, and so began the quickening of the human mind to the existence of this universal
presence. And even then the science of electricity remained a mere little group of curious
facts for nearly two hundred years, connected perhaps with magnetism--a mere