possibility of a self-propelled boat, and although the Scotch-

built engine of the little craft puffed merrily on the Seine, the



great Emperor neglected to avail himself of this formidable

weapon which might have given him his revenge for Trafalgar.



As for Fulton, he returned to the United States and, being

a practical man of business, he organised a successful steamboat



company together with Robert R. Livingston, a signer of

the Declaration of Independence, who was American Minister



to France when Fulton was in Paris, trying to sell his invention.

The first steamer of this new company, the ``Clermont,''



which was given a monopoly of all the waters of New York

State, equipped with an engine built by Boulton and Watt of



Birmingham in England, began a regular service between New

York and Albany in the year 1807.



As for poor John Fitch, the man who long before any one

else had used the ``steam-boat'' for commercial purposes, he



came to a sad death. Broken in health and empty of purse, he

had come to the end of his resources when his fifth boat, which



was propelled by means of a screw-propeller, had been destroyed.

His neighbours jeered at him as they were to laugh a



hundred years later when Professor Langley constructed his

funny flying machines. Fitch had hoped to give his country



an easy access to the broad rivers of the west and his countrymen

preferred to travel in flat-boats or go on foot. In the year



1798, in utter despair and misery, Fitch killed himself by taking

poison.



But twenty years later, the ``Savannah,'' a steamer of 1850

tons and making six knots an hour, (the Mauretania goes just



four times as fast,) crossed the ocean from Savannah to Liverpool

in the record time of twenty-five days. Then there was



an end to the derision of the multitude and in their enthusiasm

the people gave the credit for the invention to the wrong man.



Six years later, George Stephenson, a Scotchman, who had

been building locomotives for the purpose of hauling coal from



the mine-pit to smelting ovens and cotton factories, built his

famous ``travelling engine'' which reduced the price of coal by



almost seventy per cent and which made it possible to establish

the first regular passenger service between Manchester and



Liverpool, when people were whisked from city to city at the

unheard-of speed of fifteen miles per hour. A dozen years



later, this speed had been increased to twenty miles per hour.

At the present time, any well-behaved flivver (the direct descendant



of the puny little motor-driven machines of Daimler

and Levassor of the eighties of the last century) can do better



than these early ``Puffing Billies.''

But while these practically-minded engineers were improving



upon their rattling ``heat engines,'' a group of ``pure''

scientists (men who devote fourteen hours of each day to the



study of those ``theoretical'' scientificphenomena without which

no mechanical progress would be possible) were following a



new scent which promised to lead them into the most secret and

hidden domains of Nature.



Two thousand years ago, a number of Greek and Roman

philosophers (notably Thales of Miletus and Pliny who was



killed while trying to study the eruption of Vesuvius of the

year 79 when Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried beneath



the ashes) had noticed the strange antics of bits of straw and of

feather which were held near a piece of amber which was being



rubbed with a bit of wool. The schoolmen of the Middle Ages

had not been interested in this mysterious ``electric'' power.



But immediately after the Renaissance, William Gilbert, the

private physician of Queen Elizabeth, wrote his famous treatise



on the character and behaviour of Magnets. During the

Thirty Years War Otto von Guericke, the burgomaster of



Magdeburg and the inventor of the air-pump, constructed the

first electrical machine. During the next century a large number



of scientists devoted themselves to the study of electricity.

Not less than three professors invented the famous Leyden



Jar in the year 1795. At the same time, Benjamin Franklin,

the most universalgenius of America next to Benjamin Thomson



(who after his flight from New Hampshire on account of

his pro-British sympathies became known as Count Rumford)



was devoting his attention to this subject. He discovered that

lightning and the electric spark were manifestations of the same



electric power and continued his electric studies until the end of

his busy and useful life. Then came Volta with his famous



``electric pile'' and Galvani and Day and the Danish professor

Hans Christian Oersted and Ampere and Arago and Faraday,



all of them diligent searchers after the true nature of the electric

forces.



They freely gave their discoveries to the world and Samuel

Morse (who like Fulton began his career as an artist) thought



that he could use this new electric current to transmit messages

from one city to another. He intended to use copper



wire and a little machine which he had invented. People

laughed at him. Morse therefore was obliged to finance his



own experiments and soon he had spent all his money and

then he was very poor and people laughed even louder. He



then asked Congress to help him and a special Committee on

Commerce promised him their support. But the members of



Congress were not at all interested and Morse had to wait

twelve years before he was given a small congressional appropriation.



He then built a ``telegraph'' between Baltimore and

Washington. In the year 1887 he had shown his first successful



``telegraph'' in one of the lecture halls of New York

University. Finally, on the 24th of May of the year 1844 the



first long-distance message was sent from Washington to

Baltimore and to-day the whole world is covered with telegraph



wires and we can send news from Europe to Asia in a few

seconds. Twenty-three years later Alexander Graham Bell used



the electric current for his telephone. And half a century

afterwards Marconi improved upon these ideas by inventing a



system of sending messages which did away entirely with the old-

fashioned wires.



While Morse, the New Englander, was working on his

``telegraph,'' Michael Faraday, the Yorkshire-man, had constructed



the first ``dynamo.'' This tiny little machine was completed

in the year 1881 when Europe was still trembling as a



result of the great July revolutions which had so severely upset

the plans of the Congress of Vienna. The first dynamo grew



and grew and grew and to-day it provides us with heat and

with light (you know the little incandescent bulbs which Edison,



building upon French and English experiments of the forties

and fifties, first made in 1878) and with power for all sorts



of machines. If I am not mistaken the electric-engine will

soon entirely drive out the ``heat engine'' just as in the olden



days the more highly-organised prehistoric animals drove out

their less efficient neighbours.



Personally (but I know nothing about machinery) this will

make me very happy. For the electric engine which can be run



by waterpower is a clean and companionable servant of mankind

but the ``heat-engine,'' the marvel of the eighteenth century,



is a noisy and dirty creature for ever filling the world with

ridiculous smoke-stacks and with dust and soot and asking



that it be fed with coal which has to be dug out of mines at

great inconvenience and risk to thousands of people.



And if I were a novelist and not a historian, who must stick

to facts and may not use his imagination, I would describe the



happy day when the last steam locomotive shall be taken to the

Museum of Natural History to be placed next to the skeleton



of the Dynosaur and the Pteredactyl and the other extinct

creatures of a by-gone age.



THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION

BUT THE NEW ENGINES WERE VERY



EXPENSIVE AND ONLY PEOPLE OF WEALTH

COULD AFFORD THEM. THE OLD CARPENTER



OR SHOEMAKER WHO HAD BEEN HIS

OWN MASTER IN HIS LITTLE WORKSHOP



WAS OBLIGED TO HIRE HIMSELF OUT TO

THE OWNERS OF THE BIG MECHANICAL



TOOLS, AND WHILE HE MADE MORE

MONEY THAN BEFORE, HE LOST HIS



FORMER INDEPENDENCE AND HE DID NOT

LIKE THAT



IN the olden days the work of the world had been done by

independent workman的复数">workmen who sat in their own little workshops in



the front of their houses, who owned their tools, who boxed the

ears of their own apprentices and who, within the limits prescribed



by their guilds, conducted their business as it pleased

them. They lived simple lives, and were obliged to work very



long hours, but they were their own masters. If they got up

and saw that it was a fine day to go fishing, they went fishing



and there was no one to say ``no.''

But the introduction of machinery changed this. A machine



is really nothing but a greatly enlarged tool. A railroad

train which carries you at the speed of a mile a minute is



in reality a pair of very fast legs, and a steam hammer which

flattens heavy plates of iron is just a terrible big fist, made of



steel.

But whereas we can all afford a pair of good legs and a



good strong fist, a railroad train and a steam hammer and a

cotton factory are very expensive pieces of machinery and they



are not owned by a single man, but usually by a company of

people who all contribute a certain sum and then divide the



profits of their railroad or cotton mill according to the amount