Section I
THE history of mankind is the history of the attainment of
external power. Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal. From
the outset of his terrestrial career we find him supplementing
the natural strength and bodily weapons of a beast by the heat of
burning and the rough implement of stone. So he passed beyond
the ape. From that he expands. Presently he added to himself the
power of the horse and the ox, he borrowed the carrying strength
of water and the driving force of the wind, he quickened his fire
by blowing, and his simple tools, pointed first with copper and
then with iron, increased and varied and became more elaborate
and efficient. He sheltered his heat in houses and made his way
easier by paths and roads. He complicated his social
relationships and increased his efficiency by the division of
labour. He began to store up knowledge. Contrivance followed
contrivance, each making it possible for a man to do more.
Always down the lengthening record, save for a set-back ever and
again, he is doing more… A quarter of a million years ago the
utmost man was a savage, a being scarcely articulate, sheltering
in holes in the rocks, armed with a rough-hewn flint or a
fire-pointed stick, naked, living in small family groups, killed
by some younger man so soon as his first virile activity
declined. Over most of the great wildernesses of earth you would
have sought him in vain; only in a few temperate and sub-tropical
river valleys would you have found the squatting lairs of his
little herds, a male, a few females, a child or so.
He knew no future then, no kind of life except the life he led.
He fled the cave-bear over the rocks full of iron ore and the
promise of sword and spear; he froze to death upon a ledge of
coal; he drank water muddy with the clay that would one day make
cups of porcelain; he chewed the ear of wild wheat he had plucked
and gazed with a dim speculation in his eyes at the birds that
soared beyond his reach. Or suddenly he became aware of the scent
of another male and rose up roaring, his roars the formless
precursors of moral admonitions. For he was a great
individualist, that original, he suffered none other than
So through the long generations, this heavy precursor, this
ancestor of all of us, fought and bred and perished, changing
almost imperceptibly.
Yet he changed. That keen chisel of necessity which sharpened
the tiger's claw age by age and fined down the clumsy Orchippus
to the swift grace of the horse, was at work upon him-is at work
upon him still. The clumsier and more stupidly fierce among him
were killed soonest and oftenest; the finer hand, the quicker
eye, the bigger brain, the better balanced body prevailed; age by
age, the implements were a little better made, the man a little
more delicately adjusted to his possibilities. He became more
social; his herd grew larger; no longer did each man kill or
drive out his growing sons; a system of taboos made them
tolerable to him, and they revered him alive and soon even after
he was dead, and were his allies against the beasts and the rest
of mankind. (But they were forbidden to touch the women of the
tribe, they had to go out and capture women for themselves, and
each son fled from his stepmother and hid from her lest the anger
of the Old Man should be roused. All the world over, even to this
day, these ancient inevitable taboos can be traced.) And now
instead of caves came huts and hovels, and the fire was better
tended and there were wrappings and garments; and so aided, the
creature spread into colder climates, carrying food with him,
storing food-until sometimes the neglected grass-seed sprouted
again and gave a first hint of agriculture.
And already there were the beginnings of leisure and thought.
Man began to think. There were times when he was fed, when his
lusts and his fears were all appeased, when the sun shone upon
the squatting-place and dim stirrings of speculation lit his
eyes. He scratched upon a bone and found resemblance and pursued
it and began pictorial art, moulded the soft, warm clay of the
river brink between his fingers, and found a pleasure in its
patternings and repetitions, shaped it into the form of vessels,
and found that it would hold water. He watched the streaming
river, and wondered from what bountiful breast this incessant
water came; he blinked at the sun and dreamt that perhaps he
might snare it and spear it as it went down to its resting-place
amidst the distant hills. Then he was roused to convey to his
brother that once indeed he had done so-at least that some one
had done so-he mixed that perhaps with another dream almost as
daring, that one day a mammoth had been beset; and therewith
began fiction-pointing a way to achievement-and the august
prophetic procession of tales.
For scores and hundreds of centuries, for myriads of generations
that life of our fathers went on. From the beginning to the
ripening of that phase of human life, from the first clumsy
eolith of rudely chipped flint to the first implements of
polished stone, was two or three thousand centuries, ten or
fifteen thousand generations. So slowly, by human standards, did
humanity gather itself together out of the dim intimations of the
beast. And that first glimmering of speculation, that first
story of achievement, that story-teller bright-eyed and flushed
under his matted hair, gesticulating to his gaping, incredulous
listener, gripping his wrist to keep him attentive, was the most
marvellous beginning this world has ever seen. It doomed the
mammoths, and it began the setting of that snare that shall catch
the sun.
Section 2
That dream was but a moment in a man's life, whose proper
business it seemed was to get food and kill his fellows and beget
after the manner of all that belongs to the fellowship of the
beasts. About him, hidden from him by the thinnest of veils, were
the untouched sources of Power, whose magnitude we scarcely do
more than suspect even to-day, Power that could make his every
conceivable dream come real. But the feet of the race were in
the way of it, though he died blindly unknowing.
At last, in the generous levels of warm river valleys, where food
is abundant and life very easy, the emerging human overcoming his
earlier jealousies, becoming, as necessity persecuted him less
urgently, more social and tolerant and amenable, achieved a
larger community. There began a division of labour, certain of
the older men specialised in knowledge and direction, a strong
man took the fatherly leadership in war, and priest and king
began to develop their roles in the opening drama of man's
history. The priest's solicitude was seed-time and harvest and
fertility, and the king ruled peace and war. In a hundred river
valleys about the warm, temperate zone of the earth there were
already towns and temples, a score of thousand years ago. They
flourished unrecorded, ignoring the past and unsuspicious of the
future, for as yet writing had still to begin.
Very slowly did man increase his demand upon the illimitable
wealth of Power that offered itself on every hand to him. He
tamed certain animals, he developed his primordially haphazard
agriculture into a ritual, he added first one metal to his
resources and then another, until he had copper and tin and iron
and lead and gold and silver to supplement his stone, he hewed
and carved wood, made pottery, paddled down his river until he
came to the sea, discovered the wheel and made the first roads.
But his chief activity for a hundred centuries and more, was the
subjugation of himself and others to larger and larger societies.
The history of man is not simply the conquest of external power;
it is first the conquest of those distrusts and fiercenesses,
that self-concentration and intensity of animalism, that tie his
hands from taking his inheritance. The ape in us still resents
association. From the dawn of the age of polished stone to the
achievement of the Peace of the World, man's dealings were
chiefly with himself and his fellow man, trading, bargaining,
law-making, propitiating, enslaving, conquering, exterminating,
and every little increment in Power, he turned at once and always
turns to the purposes of this confused elaborate struggle to
socialise. To incorporate and comprehend his fellow men into a
community of purpose became the last and greatest of his
instincts. Already before the last polished phase of the stone
age was over he had become a political animal. He made
astonishingly far-reaching discoveries within himself, first of
counting and then of writing and making records, and with that
his town communities began to stretch out to dominion; in the
valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and the great Chinese rivers,
the first empires and the first written laws had their
beginnings. Men specialised for fighting and rule as soldiers and
knights. Later, as ships grew seaworthy, the Mediterranean which
had been a barrier became a highway, and at last out of a tangle
of pirate polities came the great struggle of Carthage and Rome.
The history of Europe is the history of the victory and breaking
up of the Roman Empire. Every ascendant monarch in Europe up to
the last, aped Caesar and called himself Kaiser or Tsar or
Imperator or Kasir-i-Hind. Measured by the duration of human life
it is a vast space of time between that first dynasty in Egypt
and the coming of the aeroplane, but by the scale that looks back
to the makers of the eoliths, it is all of it a story of
yesterday.
Now during this period of two hundred centuries or more, this
period of the warring states, while men's minds were chiefly
preoccupied by politics and mutual aggression, their progress in
the acquirement of external Power was slow-rapid in comparison
with the progress of the old stone age, but slow in comparison
with this new age of systematic discovery in which we live. They
did not very greatly alter the weapons and tactics of warfare,
the methods of agriculture, seamanship, their knowledge of the
habitable globe, or the devices and utensils of domestic life
between the days of the early Egyptians and the days when
Christopher Columbus was a child. Of course, there were
inventions and changes, but there were also retrogressions;
things were found out and then forgotten again; it was, on the
whole, a progress, but it contained no steps; the peasant life
was the same, there were already priests and lawyers and town
craftsmen and territorial lords and rulers doctors, wise women,
soldiers and sailors in Egypt and China and Assyria and
south-eastern Europe at the beginning of that period, and they
were doing much the same things and living much the same life as
they were in Europe in A.D. 1500. The English excavators of the
year A.D. 1900 could delve into the remains of Babylon and Egypt
and disinter legal documents, domestic accounts, and family
correspondence that they could read with the completest sympathy.
There were great religious and moral changes throughout the
period, empires and republics replaced one another, Italy tried a
vast experiment in slavery, and indeed slavery was tried again
and again and failed and failed and was still to be tested again
and rejected again in the New World; Christianity and
Mohammedanism swept away a thousand more specialised cults, but
essentially these were progressive adaptations of mankind to
material conditions that must have seemed fixed for ever. The
idea of revolutionary changes in the material conditions of life
would have been entirely strange to human thought through all
that time.
Yet the dreamer, the story-teller, was there still, waiting for
his opportunity amidst the busy preoccupations, the comings and
goings, the wars and processions, the castle building and
cathedral building, the arts and loves, the small diplomacies and
incurable feuds, the crusades and trading journeys of the middle
ages. He no longer speculated with the untrammelled freedom of
the stone-age savage; authoritative explanations of everything
barred his path; but he speculated with a better brain, sat idle
and gazed at circling stars in the sky and mused upon the coin
and crystal in his hand. Whenever there was a certain leisure for
thought throughout these times, then men were to be found
dissatisfied with the appearances of things, dissatisfied with
the assurances of orthodox belief, uneasy with a sense of unread
symbols in the world about them, questioning the finality of
scholastic wisdom. Through all the ages of history there were
men to whom this whisper had come of hidden things about them.
They could no longer lead ordinary lives nor content themselves
with the common things of this world once they had heard this
voice. And mostly they believed not only that all this world was
as it were a painted curtain before things unguessed at, but that
these secrets were Power. Hitherto Power had come to men by
chance, but now there were these seekers seeking, seeking among
rare and curious and perplexing objects, sometimes finding some
odd utilisable thing, sometimes deceivingthemselves with fancied
discovery, sometimes pretending to find. The world of every day
laughed at these eccentric beings, or found them annoying and
ill-treated them, or was seized with fear and made saints and
sorcerers and warlocks of them, or with covetousness and
entertained them hopefully; but for the greater part heeded them
not at all. Yet they were of the blood of him who had first
dreamt of attacking the mammoth; every one of them was of his
blood and descent; and the thing they sought, all unwittingly,
was the snare that will some day catch the sun.
Section 3
Such a man was that Leonardo da Vinci, who went about the court
of Sforza in Milan in a state of dignified abstraction. His
common-place books are full of prophetic subtlety and ingenious
anticipations of the methods of the early aviators. Durer was his
parallel and Roger Bacon-whom the Franciscans silenced-of his
kindred. Such a man again in an earlier city was Hero of
Alexandria, who knew of the power of steam nineteen hundred years
before it was first brought into use. And earlier still was
Archimedes of Syracuse, and still earlier the legendary Daedalus
of Cnossos. All up and down the record of history whenever there
was a little leisure from war and brutality the seekers appeared.
And half the alchemists were of their tribe.
When Roger Bacon blew up his first batch of gunpowder one might
have supposed that men would have gone at once to the explosive
engine. But they could see nothing of the sort. They were not
yet beginning to think of seeing things; their metallurgy was all
too poor to make such engines even had they thought of them. For
a time they could not make instruments sound enough to stand this
new force even for so rough a purpose as hurling a missile. Their
first guns had barrels of coopered timber, and the world waited
for more than five hundred years before the explosive engine
came.
Even when the seekers found, it was at first a long journey
before the world could use their findings for any but the
roughest, most obvious purposes. If man in general was not still
as absolutely blind to the unconquered energies about him as his
paleolithic precursor, he was at best purblind.
Section 4
The latent energy of coal and the power of steam waited long on
the verge of discovery, before they began to influence human
lives.
There were no doubt many such devices as Hero's toys devised and
forgotten, time after time, in courts and palaces, but it needed
that coal should be mined and burning with plenty of iron at hand
before it dawned upon men that here was something more than a
curiosity. And it is to be remarked that the first recorded
suggestion for the use of steam was in war; there is an
Elizabethan pamphlet in which it is proposed to fire shot out of
corked iron bottles full of heated water. The mining of coal for
fuel, the smelting of iron upon a larger scale than 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 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 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
among the dark trees in the garden of the villa under the warm
blue night sky of Italy; how he caught and kept them in cages,
dissected them, first studying the general anatomy of insects
very elaborately, and how he began to experiment with the effect
of various gases and varying temperature upon their light. Then
the chance present of a little scientific toy invented by Sir
William Crookes, a toy called the spinthariscope, on which radium
particles impinge upon sulphide of zinc and make it luminous,
induced him to associate the two sets of phenomena. It was a
happy association for his inquiries. It was a rare and fortunate
thing, too, that any one with the mathematical gift should have
been taken by these curiosities.
Section 8
And while the boy Holsten was mooning over his fireflies at
Fiesole, a certain professor of physics named Rufus was giving a
course of afternoon lectures upon Radium and Radio-Activity in
Edinburgh. They were lectures that had attracted a very
considerable amount of attention. He gave them in a small
lecture-theatre that had become more and more congested as his
course proceeded. At his concluding discussion it was crowded
right up to the ceiling at the back, and there people were
standing, standing without any sense of fatigue, so fascinating
did they find his suggestions. One youngster in particular, a
chuckle-headed, scrub-haired lad from the Highlands, sat hugging
his knee with great sand-red hands and drinking in every word,
eyes aglow, cheeks flushed, and ears burning.
'And so,' said the professor, 'we see that this Radium, which
seemed at first a fantastic exception, a mad inversion of all
that was most established and fundamental in the constitution of
matter, is really at one with the rest of the elements. It does
noticeably and forcibly what probably all the other elements are
doing with an imperceptible slowness. It is like the single
voice crying aloud that betrays the silent breathing multitude in
the darkness. Radium is an element that is breaking up and flying
to pieces. But perhaps all elements are doing that at less
perceptible rates. Uranium certainly is; thorium-the stuff of
this incandescent gas mantle-certainly is; actinium. I feel
that we are but beginning the list. And we know now that the
atom, that once we thought hard and impenetrable, and indivisible
and final and-lifeless-lifeless, is really a reservoir of
immense energy. That is the most wonderful thing about all this
work. A little while ago we thought of the atoms as we thought
of bricks, as solid building material, as substantial matter, as
unit masses of lifeless stuff, and behold! these bricks are
boxes, treasure boxes, boxes full of the intensest force. This
little bottle contains about a pint of uranium oxide; that is to
say, about fourteen 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 might have envied.
The lecture was over, the audience hung silent for a few seconds,
sighed, became audible, stirred, fluttered, prepared for
dispersal. More light was turned on and what had been a dim mass
of figures became a bright confusion of movement. Some of the
people signalled to friends, some crowded down towards the
platform to examine the lecturer's apparatus and make notes of
his diagrams. But the chuckle-headed lad with the scrub hair
wanted no such detailed frittering away of the thoughts that had
inspired him. He wanted to be alone with them; he elbowed his way
out almost fiercely, he made himself as angular and bony as a
cow, fearing lest some one should speak to him, lest some one
should invade his glowing sphere of enthusiasm.
He went through the streets with a rapt face, like a saint who
sees visions. He had arms disproportionately long, and
ridiculous big feet.
He must get alone, get somewhere high out of all this crowding of
commonness, of everyday life.
He made his way to the top of Arthur's Seat, and there he sat for
a long time in the golden evening sunshine, still, except that
ever and again he whispered to himself some precious phrase that
had stuck in his mind.
'If,' he whispered, 'if only we could pick that lock…'
The sun was sinking over the distant hills. Already it was shorn
of its beams, a globe of ruddy gold, hanging over the great banks
of cloud that would presently engulf it.
'Eh!' said the youngster. 'Eh!'
He seemed to wake up at last out of his entrancement, and the red
sun was there before his eyes. He stared at it, at first without
intelligence, and then with a gathering recognition. Into his
mind came a strange echo of that ancestral fancy, that fancy of a
Stone Age savage, dead and scattered bones among the drift two
hundred thousand years ago.
'Ye auld thing,' he said-and his eyes were shining, and he made
a kind of grabbing gesture with his hand; 'ye auld red thing…
We'll have ye YET.'