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 was admirably done. He separated all the known
ingredients of the air with a precision altogether remarkable; he
even put it upon record that he had some doubt about the purity
of the nitrogen. For more than a hundred years his determination
was repeated by chemists all the world over, his apparatus was
treasured in London, he became, as they used to say, 'classic,'
and always, at every one of the innumerable repetitions of his
experiment, that sly element argon was hiding among the nitrogen
(and with a little helium and traces of other substances, and
indeed all the hints that might have led to the new departures of
the twentieth-century chemistry), and every time it slipped
unobserved through the professorial fingers that repeated his
procedure.
Is it any wonder then with this margin of inaccuracy, that up to
the very dawn of the twentieth-century scientific discovery was
still rather a procession of happy accidents than an orderly
conquest of nature?
Yet the spirit of seeking was spreading steadily through the
world. Even the schoolmaster could not check it. For the mere
handful who grew up to feel wonder and curiosity about the
secrets of nature in the nineteenth century, there were now, at
the beginning of the twentieth, myriads escaping from the
limitations of intellectual routine and the habitual life, in
Europe, in America, North and South, in Japan, in China, and all
about the world.
It was in 1910 that the parents of young Holsten, who was to be
called by a whole generation of scientific men, 'the greatest of
European chemists,' were staying in a villa near Santo Domenico,
between Fiesole and Florence. He was then only fifteen, but he
was already distinguished as a mathematician and possessed by a
savage appetite to understand. He had been particularly attracted
by the mystery of phosphorescence and its apparent unrelatedness
to every other source of light. He was to tell afterwards in his
reminiscences how he watched the fireflies drifting and glowing