The World Set Free | Page 9

ounces of the element uranium. It is worth about a pound. And in this
bottle, ladies and gentlemen, in the atoms in this bottle there slumbers at least as much
energy as we could get by burning a hundred and sixty tons of coal. If at a word, in one
instant I could suddenly release that energy here and now it would blow us and
everything about us to fragments; if I could turn it into the machinery that lights this city,
it could keep Edinburgh brightly lit for a week. But at present no man knows, no man has
an inkling of how this little lump of stuff can be made to hasten the release of its store. It
does release it, as a burn trickles. Slowly the uranium changes into radium, the radium
changes into a gas called the radium emanation, and that again to what we call radium A,
and so the process goes on, giving out energy at every stage, until at last we reach the last
stage of all, which is, so far as we can tell at present, lead. But we cannot hasten it.'
'I take ye, man,' whispered the chuckle-headed lad, with his red hands tightening like a
vice upon his knee. 'I take ye, man. Go on! Oh, go on!'
The professor went on after a little pause. 'Why is the change gradual?' he asked. 'Why
does only a minute fraction of the radium disintegrate in any particular second? Why
does it dole itself out so slowly and so exactly? Why does not all the uranium change to
radium and all the radium change to the next lowest thing at once? Why this decay by
driblets; why not a decay en masse? . . . Suppose presently we find it is possible to
quicken that decay?'
The chuckle-headed lad nodded rapidly. The wonderful inevitable idea was coming. He
drew his knee up towards his chin and swayed in his seat with excitement. 'Why not?' he
echoed, 'why not?'
The professor lifted his forefinger.

'Given that knowledge,' he said, 'mark what we should be able to do! We should not only
be able to use this uranium and thorium; not only should we have a source of power so
potent that a man might carry in his hand the energy to light a city for a year, fight a fleet
of battleships, or drive one of our giant liners across the Atlantic; but we should also have
a clue that would enable us at last to quicken the process of disintegration in all the other
elements, where decay is still so slow as to escape our finest measurements. Every scrap
of solid matter in the world would become an available reservoir of concentrated force.
Do you realise, ladies and gentlemen, what these things would mean for us?'
The scrub head nodded. 'Oh! go on. Go on.'
'It would mean a change in human conditions that I can only compare to the discovery of
fire, that first discovery that lifted man above the brute. We stand to-day towards
radio-activity as our ancestor stood towards fire before he had learnt to make it. He knew
it then only as a strange thing utterly beyond his control, a flare on the crest of the
volcano, a red destruction that poured through the forest. So it is that we know
radio-activity to-day. This--this is the dawn of a new day in human living. At the climax
of that civilisation which had its beginning in the hammered flint and the fire-stick of the
savage, just when it is becoming apparent that our ever-increasing needs cannot be borne
indefinitely by our present sources of energy, we discover suddenly the possibility of an
entirely new civilisation. The energy we need for our very existence, and with which
Nature supplies us still so grudgingly, is in reality locked up in inconceivable quantities
all about us. We cannot pick that lock at present, but----'
He paused. His voice sank so that everybody strained a little to hear him.
'----we will.'
He put up that lean finger again, his solitary gesture.
'And then,' he said. . . .
'Then that perpetual struggle for existence, that perpetual struggle to live on the bare
surplus of Nature's energies will cease to be the lot of Man. Man will step from the
pinnacle of this civilisation to the beginning of the next. I have no eloquence, ladies and
gentlemen, to express the vision of man's material destiny that opens out before me. I see
the desert continents transformed, the poles no longer wildernesses of ice, the whole
world once more Eden. I see the power of man reach out among the stars....'
He stopped abruptly with a catching of the breath that many an actor or orator