Flexible and malleable glass are no longer scientific curiosities; and toughened glass bells break the night’s silence with their sweet chiming of the hours as they fly.
In porcelain and other ceramic wares the long-lost arts of the ancients have been rivalled or revived; and the most exquisite productions of the Land of the Rising Sun duplicated or excelled.
In brewing and wine-making all hurtful compounds are eliminated, and none but the health-giving and gladdening retained.
In mechanics an entirely new principle has been applied; the cold of winter, as well as the heat of summer, being harnessed to do man’s work. The scientific engineers of 1925 recognized the fact that in any motor it was the difference between the initial and final temperatures of the steam, gas, or other medium employed, that did the work; this work being the utilizable percentage of that difference in temperature; and acting upon this idea, by 1935 there were engines which ran by cold as well as those driven by heat. The snow-fields of winter then, as well as the great arid plains of summer, have for some time been used to make and store up power, which is used only as wanted.
A striking landscape feature is the great number of windmills, stately, picturesque and beautiful, which lazily flap their sails or merrily spin with the brisk breeze, generating and storing up power for the houses upon which they are perched. These mills are let run full speed in the fiercest storms; the surplus of power going to the owner’s storage system, to be used when wanted, or contributed to the common stock in case of need.
Railway cars are made very largely of aluminum and paper, thus possessing great stiffness, lightness and strength.
Many new varieties of steel have made their appearance; boron and silicon being used indifferently with carbon in forming combinations with iron, which possesses properties never before seen in steels of any kind.
The hardening of copper has been rediscovered, and for twenty-five or more years this metal has been tempered and worked just as steel was in the century preceding.
The manufacture of anti-friction metals has been so far advanced that the use of lubricants is rendered unnecessary.
Transportation of the person and of goods, large and small, is as greatly advanced as that of ideas and images.