The plate-ways carry an electric current which may be taken off by those vehicles provided with necessary motors and connecting appliances; so that the horses have little traction to do; and in fact some private vehicles, never going off the streets supplied with plate-ways, have no horses at all.
Other private vehicles are supplied with motors deriving their current from overhead wires, not through trollies as once done in electric railways, but by induction.
Storage batteries that are light and compact have been invented and are already in use for driving carriages along roads which have neither plate-ways nor overhead conductors by which the current can be carried by induction to the motors within the vehicles. The motors for such private carriages are no larger than a man’s hat, and are turned out by the thousand just as Waterbury watches were made in 1893.
In other divisions of the broad domain of science, than those referred to in detail, the past fifty years have been laurel-crowned.
Astronomers have not been idle during the last sixty years or so. They have reached out into space, and discovered enough asteroids to account for the lost planet between Mars and Jupiter; and have supplied the missing link between Mercury and the sun. With the spectroscope they have found in the sun and various planets, several new metals, for which, by analogy they have searched on earth, and many of which they have found.
The geologists, delving into the crust of the earth, have mapped out its entire surface, so that the location of every considerable quantity of gold, silver, iron, copper, tin, coal, oil, etc., is known and recorded, and useless prospecting done away with. The Arctic and Antarctic zones have been thoroughly worked, the open Polar Sea discovered and regularly traversed, and the mines of the Polar regions worked regularly and with profit for metals and minerals used every day in the world’s industrial pursuits.
Scarcity of rain in any one place is promptly counteracted by each local government by consent of the others concerned; great fires being started to attract the clouds, which will bring in their arms the friendly drops.
The fine arts of 1943 have kept pace with other branches of culture.
Sculpture and painting, instead of having been thrown into the shade by the wonderful achievements in photography and engraving, have received a great impetus. Leading citizens vie with each other in purchasing (sometimes even in making) statues to adorn their own homes and gardens, and public streets and parks. In the same way painting is taught as a science as well as an art; to be a fair painter being more common than to be a fair performer upon the instrument once known as “pianoforte.” The pipe organ has become the national musical instrument, and its glorious tones are heard from houses of far less than palatial pretensions.
The public buildings of this country, no longer laughing-stocks for foreigners, are at once spacious, beautiful, substantial and convenient. In them the new American style of architecture, in which proportions are of more value than arrangement, finds fitting types on every hand.