Twentieth Century Inventions: A Forecast

by George Sutherland

With dynamos driven by steam-engines, the price of electrically-manufactured nitrate of soda would, according to the estimate of Sir William Crookes, be £26 per ton, but at Niagara, where water power is very cheap, not more than £5 per ton. Thus it will be seen that the cheapness of power due to the presence of the waterfall makes such a difference in the economic aspects of the problem of the electrical manufacture of manurial nitrates as to reduce the price to less than one-fifth! It must be remembered that at the close of the nineteenth century the electric installation at Niagara is by very many persons looked upon as being in itself in the nature of an experiment, but at any rate there seems to be no room for doubt that the cost of natural power for electrical installations will very soon be materially reduced. Even at the price quoted, namely £5 per ton, the cost of nitrate of soda made with electrically combined atmospheric nitrogen compares very favourably with commercial nitrates as now imported for agriculture purposes. "Chili nitrate," in fact, is about fifty per cent. dearer.

When wave-power and other forms of the stored energy of the wind have been properly harnessed in the service of mankind, the region around Niagara will only be one of thousands of localities at which nitrogenous manures can be manufactured electrically at a price far below the present cost of natural deposits of nitrate of soda. From the power stations all around the coasts, as well as from those on waterfalls and windy heights among the mountains, electric cables will be employed to convey the current for fixing the nitrogen of the air at places where the manures are most wanted.

The rediscovery of the art of irrigation is one of the distinguishing features of modern industrial progress in agriculture. Extensive ruins and other remains in Assyria, Egypt, India, China and Central America prove beyond question that irrigation played a vastly more important part in the industrial life of the ancients than it does in that of modern mankind. This is true in spite of the fact that power and dominion ultimately fell to the lot of those races which originally dwelt in colder and more hilly or thickly-wooded regions, where the instincts of hunting and of warfare were naturally developed, so that, by degrees, the peoples who understood irrigation fell under the sway of those who neither needed nor appreciated it. In the long interval vast forests have been cleared away and the warlike habits of the northern and mountainous races have been greatly modified, but manufacturing progress among them has enabled them to perpetuate the power originally secured by the bow and the spear. The irrigating races of mankind are now held in fear of the modern weapons which are the products of the iron and steel industries, just as they were thousands of years ago terrorised by the inroads of the wild hunting men from the North.

But the future of agriculture will very largely belong to a class of men who will combine in themselves the best attributes of the irrigationist and the man who knows how to use the iron weapon and the iron implement. As the manufacturing supremacy of the North becomes more and more assured by reason of the superior healthiness of a climate encouraging activity of muscle and brain, so the agricultural prospects of the warmer regions of the earth's surface will be improved by the comparative immunity of plant and of animal life from disease in a dry atmosphere. Sheep, cattle and horses thrive far better in a climate having but a scanty rainfall than in one having an abundance of wet; and so, also, does the wheat plant when the limited rains happen to be timed to suit its growth, and the best kinds of fruit trees when the same conditions prevail.

All this points to an immense recrudescence of irrigation in the near future. Already the Californians and other Americans of the Pacific Slope have demonstrated that irrigation is a practice fully as well suited to the requirements of a thoroughly up-to-date people as it has been for long ages to those of the "unchanging East". But here again the question of cheap power obtrudes itself. The Chinese, Hindoos and Egyptians have long ago passed the stage at which the limited areas which were irrigable by gravitation, without advanced methods of engineering, have been occupied; and the lifting of water for the supplying of their paddy fields has been for thousands of years a laborious occupation for the poorest and most degraded of the rural population.

In a system of civilisation in which transport costs so little as it does in railway and steam-ship freights, the patches of territory which can be irrigated by water brought by gravitation from the hills or from the upper reaches of rivers are comparatively easy of access to a market. This fact retards the advent of the time when colossal installations for the throwing of water upon the land will be demanded. When that epoch arrives, as it assuredly will before the first half of the twentieth century has been nearly past, the pumping plants devoted to the purposes of irrigation will present as great a contrast to the lifting appliances of the East as does a fully loaded freight train or a mammoth steam cargo-slave to a coolie carrier.

At the same time there must inevitably be a great extension of the useful purposes to which small motors can be applied in irrigation. Year by year the importance of the sprinkler, not only for ornamental grounds such as lawns and flower-beds, but also for the vegetable patch and the fruit garden, becomes more apparent, and efforts are being made towards the enlargement of the arms of sprinkling contrivances to such an extent as to enable them to throw a fine shower of water over a very large area of ground. Sometimes a windmill is used for pumping river or well-water into high tanks from which it descends by gravitation into the sprinklers, the latter being operated by the power of the liquid as it descends. This mode of working is convenient in many cases; but a more important, because a more widely applicable, method in the future will be that in which the wind-motor not only lifts the water, but scatters it around in the same operation. Long helical-shaped screws, horizontally fixed between uprights or set on a swivel on a single high tower, can be used for loading the breeze with a finely divided shower of water and thus projecting the moisture to very long distances. A windmill of the ordinary pattern, as used for gardens, may be fitted with a long perforated pipe, supported by wire guys instead of a vane, a connection being made by a water-tight swivel-joint between this pipe and that which carries the liquid from the pump. In this way every stroke of the machine sends innumerable jets of water out upon the wind, to be carried far afield.

Gardening properties in comparatively dry climates, fitted with machines of this description, can be laid out in different zones of cultivation, determined according to the prevailing directions of the wind and the consequent distribution of the water supply. Thus if the wind most frequently blows from the west the plants which require the most water must be laid out at the eastern side, not too far from the sprinkler. Facilities for shutting off the supply of spray at will are, of course, very necessary. The system of watering founded on this principle depends upon the assumption that if the gardener or the farmer could always turn on the rain when he has a fairly good wind he would never lack for seasonable moisture to nourish his crops. This will be found in practice to apply correctly to the great majority of food plants. In the dry climates, which are so eminently healthy for cereals, "the early and the latter rains," as referred to in Scripture, are both needed, and one of the most important applications of cheap power will be directed to supplementing the natural supply either at one end or at the other.

The "tree-doctor" will be a personage of increasing importance in the rural economy of the twentieth century. He is already well in sight; but for lack of capital and of a due appreciation of the value of his services, he occupies as yet but a comparatively subordinate position. Fruits, which are nature's most elaborately worked-up edible products, must come more and more into favour as the complement to the seed food represented by bread. As the demand increases it will be more clearly seen that an enormous waste of labour is involved in the culture of an orchard unless its trees are kept in perfect health. At the same time the law of specialization must operate to set aside the tree-doctor to his separate duties, just as the physician and the veterinary surgeon already find their own distinctive spheres of work. The apparatus required for the thorough eradication of disease in fruit trees will be too expensive for the average grower to find any advantage in buying it for use only a few times during the year; but the tree-doctor, with his gangs of men, will be able to keep his special appliances at work nearly all the year round.

For the destruction of almost all classes of fruit-pests, the only really complete method now in sight is the application of a poisonous gas, such as hydrocyanic acid, which is retained by means of a gas-proof tent pitched around each tree. No kind of a spray or wash can penetrate between bark and stem or into the cavities on fruit so well as a gaseous insecticide which permeates the whole of the air within the included space. But the gas-tight tent system of fumigation is as yet only in its infancy, and its growth and development will greatly help to place the fruit-growing industry on a new basis, and to bring the best kinds of fruit within the reach of the middle classes, the artisans, and ultimately even the very poor. Just as wheaten bread from being a luxury reserved for the rich has become the staple of food for all grades of society, so fruits which are now commonly regarded as an indulgence, although a very desirable addition to the food of the well-to-do, must, in a short time, become practically a necessity to the great mass of the people generally.