The World Set Free | Page 7

guess
that--perhaps with the lightning. Frogs' legs must have hung by copper hooks from iron
railings and twitched upon countless occasions before Galvani saw them. Except for the
lightning conductor, it was 250 years after Gilbert before electricity stepped out of the
cabinet of scientific curiosities into the life of the common man.... Then suddenly, in the
half-century between 1880 and 1930, it ousted the steam-engine and took over traction, it
ousted every other form of household heating, abolished distance with the perfected
wireless telephone and the telephotograph....
Section 6
And there was an extraordinary mental resistance to discovery and invention for at least a
hundred years after the scientific revolution had begun. Each new thing made its way into
practice against a scepticism that amounted at times to hostility. One writer upon these
subjects gives a funny little domestic conversation that happened, he says, in the year
1898, within ten years, that is to say, of the time when the first aviators were fairly on the
wing. He tells us how he sat at his desk in his study and conversed with his little boy.
His little boy was in profound trouble. He felt he had to speak very seriously to his father,
and as he was a kindly little boy he did not want to do it too harshly.
This is what happened.
'I wish, Daddy,' he said, coming to his point, 'that you wouldn't write all this stuff about
flying. The chaps rot me.'
'Yes!' said his father.
'And old Broomie, the Head I mean, he rots me. Everybody rots me.'
'But there is going to be flying--quite soon.'

The little boy was too well bred to say what he thought of that. 'Anyhow,' he said, 'I wish
you wouldn't write about it.'
'You'll fly--lots of times--before you die,' the father assured him.
The little boy looked unhappy.
The father hesitated. Then he opened a drawer and took out a blurred and
under-developed photograph. 'Come and look at this,' he said.
The little boy came round to him. The photograph showed a stream and a meadow
beyond, and some trees, and in the air a black, pencil-like object with flat wings on either
side of it. It was the first record of the first apparatus heavier than air that ever maintained
itself in the air by mechanical force. Across the margin was written: 'Here we go up, up,
up--from S. P. Langley, Smithsonian Institution, Washington.'
The father watched the effect of this reassuring document upon his son. 'Well?' he said.
'That,' said the schoolboy, after reflection, 'is only a model.'
'Model to-day, man to-morrow.'
The boy seemed divided in his allegiance. Then he decided for what he believed quite
firmly to be omniscience. 'But old Broomie,' he said, 'he told all the boys in his class only
yesterday, "no man will ever fly." No one, he says, who has ever shot grouse or pheasants
on the wing would ever believe anything of the sort....'
Yet that boy lived to fly across the Atlantic and edit his father's reminiscences.
Section 7
At the close of the nineteenth century as a multitude of passages in the literature of that
time witness, it was thought that the fact that man had at last had successful and
profitable dealings with the steam that scalded him and the electricity that flashed and
banged about the sky at him, was an amazing and perhaps a culminating exercise of his
intelligence and his intellectual courage. The air of 'Nunc Dimittis' sounds in same of
these writings. 'The great things are discovered,' wrote Gerald Brown in his summary of
the nineteenth century. 'For us there remains little but the working out of detail.' The
spirit of the seeker was still rare in the world; education was unskilled, unstimulating,
scholarly, and but little valued, and few people even then could have realised that Science
was still but the flimsiest of trial sketches and discovery scarcely beginning. No one
seems to have been afraid of science and its possibilities. Yet now where there had been
but a score or so of seekers, there were many thousands, and for one needle of
speculation that had been probing the curtain of appearances in 1800, there were now
hundreds. And already Chemistry, which had been content with her atoms and molecules
for the better part of a century, was preparing herself for that vast next stride that was to
revolutionise the whole life of man from top to bottom.

One realises how crude was the science of that time when one considers the case of the
composition of air. This was determined by that strange genius and recluse, that man of
mystery, that disembowelled intelligence, Henry Cavendish, towards the end of the
eighteenth century. So far as he was concerned the work