PRACTICAL RESULTS OF THEORETICAL SCIENCE.
What are the great wonders, the great sources of man’s material strength, wealth, and comfort in modern times? The Railway, with its mile-long trains of men and merchandise, moving with the velocity of the wind, and darting over chasms a thousand feet wide; the Electric Telegraph, along which man’s thoughts travel with the velocity of light, and girdle the earth more quickly than Puck’s promise to his master; the contrivance by which the Magnet, in the very middle of a strip of iron, is still true to the distant pole, and remains a faithful guide to the mariner; the Electrotype process, by which a metallic model of any given object, unerringly exact, grows into being like a flower. Now, all these wonders are the result of recent and profound discoveries in theoretical science. The Locomotive Steam-engine, and the Steam-engine in all its other wonderful and invaluable applications, derives its efficacy from the discoveries, by Watt and others, of the laws of steam. The Railway Bridge is not made strong by mere accumulation of materials, but by the most exact and careful scientific examination of the means of giving the requisite strength to every part, as in the great example of Mr. Stephenson’s Britannia Bridge over the Menai Strait. The Correction of the Magnetic Needle in iron ships it would have been impossible for Mr. Airy to secure without a complete theoretical knowledge of the laws of Magnetism. The Electric Telegraph and the Electrotype process include in their principles and mechanism the most complete and subtle results of electrical and magnetical theory.—Edinburgh Review, No. 216.