A Hundred Years Hence: The Expectations of an Optimist

by T. Baron Russell

CHAPTER VII

THE MARCH OF SCIENCE

In a forecast like the present it is impossible to avoid a certain amount of overlapping in different sections of the subject and a certain blending of topics in a single chapter. The attempt to differentiate consistently between the progress of science as science, and the concurrent advance of practical invention by which scientific discovery is turned to use would only involve needless repetition. I have already had occasion to suggest elements of material progress which presuppose the advance in pure science that would make them possible. Thus, in endeavouring to suggest what the methods of commerce and the condition of our cities are likely to be in the future it was necessary to conceive certain advances in our knowledge of what is rather clumsily called “wireless” telegraphy, and to predict the discovery of new and cheap methods of analysing water into its component gases as a source of fuel and as means for the production of electricity: and in order to avoid useless repetition it was found convenient to work out in a rough manner the various ways in which the cheap and inexhaustible supplies of hydrogen and oxygen which I have imagined discovery to have placed at the disposal of invention would be employed in the arts. Similarly, when we interrogate imagination on the subject of scientific discovery itself, we shall be forced to think chiefly of the practical results likely to be achieved by it, and indeed there would otherwise be hardly any purpose to serve by the effort. What imports the greatest amount of complexity into the subject is the difficulty of conceiving the lines upon which science is likely to travel, unless we allow ourselves to be guided by the practical requirements of the future as far as we are able to foresee them. Imagination has indeed superabundant room in which to run riot when it endeavours to give form to the probabilities of scientific discovery; and the only danger is that effort may be wasted in purely fanciful directions, if it be not pretty securely tied down by some such artificial restraint as the convention of keeping more or less strictly to the anticipation of discoveries likely to have immediate practical application.

For instance, there is hardly any end to the developments we might allow ourselves to imagine as arising out of the new theories, still in a probationary condition, as to the ultimate physical structure of the universe. Such conjectures might be followed indefinitely in several directions, and the resulting conclusions would be more likely to err by timidity than by extravagance: but as there is no knowledge at present available which could serve as a guide to the probably-right, and as a warning against the probably-wrong, directions, it would be neither interesting nor useful to pursue them. Radium “the revealer,” as Dr Saleeby has called it in one of those brilliant papers which fine imagination and delicate fancy have adorned with many another noble phrase and memorable image, opens the door to a whole world of new possibilities. Our whole conception of cosmic processes may have to be remodelled, in the light of those tiny scintillations which the spinthariscope has popularised. Already our notions concerning the nature of matter have been revolutionised. We are told that atoms, regarded hitherto as the ultimate units of matter—so small that Lord Kelvin has calculated that if a drop of water were magnified to the size of the earth the atoms in it would be somewhere between the size of small shot and the size of cricket balls—are themselves made up of a stuff so almost infinitely more tenuous, that the particles of it within the atom are, relatively to their size, farther apart than the planets of the solar system. Nor is this all. These particles, commonly called electrons, if particles they can still be designated at all, were at first said to “carry” a charge of electricity. But it now seems that they are electricity itself. If this be true, we should seem to be on the point of bridging the void between what used to be called the eternal antithetics—matter and force: and whither this will lead us can only with the greatest caution be pre-imagined. In any case the consequences of this discovery, philosophical as well as scientific, are stupefying in the possibilities they open up to the thinker as well as to the man of practical science. At last science begins to join hands with philosophy. What will be the philosophy of a hundred years hence, imagination pales before the effort of attempting to conceive.

But the working out of the revelations promised by radiology belongs rather to this end of the century than to the other. During the interval there can be no doubt that electricity, already man’s chief handmaid, will have increased and perhaps completed her services to the race. When, as I ventured to suggest in a former chapter, inexhaustible and cheap “current” is yielded to us by some method of utilising the electrical reciprocity of the hydrogen and oxygen gases derived from water, doubtless all machinery will be electrically driven, all transport electrically propelled. Perhaps this discovery lies so far in the foreground of the future as to be irrelevant to any anticipations of the world’s condition a hundred years hence. The full development of electrically-driven machinery lies in the middle distance, and the duration of the electrical age can hardly be precalculated with any greater exactness than the suggestion that it will probably have reached, or at all events approached, its end in about a century’s time.

The most important problem connected with this subject is to imagine, if we can, how electrical power will be applied. It is quite evident that the device of long conductors, either overhead or below ground—the “live wires” of alarmed America—is too clumsy and too dangerous to be long tolerated. It is indeed a public scandal that cables carrying an electrical charge capable of killing or paralysing at a touch should be suspended over the heads of the citizens, exposed to momentary breakage by snowfall, high wind, or the inevitable wear which careless inspectors may overlook: and the mere fact that a horse can occasionally set foot on a ground plate and fall dead from the contact shows that even the vaunted “conduit system” must not be regarded as anything but a strictly-temporary device. Some of the dangers of the underground electric wires arise out of the use of our present illuminating gas, when a pipe leaks into a manhole or inspection chamber, forming an explosive mixture of gas and air, which presently becomes ignited by an electric spark and blows up the whole affair. No doubt coal gas is within easily measurable distance of its end as a convenience of civilisation. But it is extremely probable that hydrogen and oxygen will be conveyed by mains to houses and public buildings during a long time: and it is hardly possible to believe that the mains will not sometimes leak and be capable of letting out mixtures far more dangerous on ignition than the mixture of coal gas and air, and still more dangerous because neither of the gases, nor the mixture of them, has any smell, unless indeed we should take the precaution of giving them one artificially. Whatever we may do, and we shall do much, to minimise the dangers of highly-evolved civilisation, accidents will always occur, and their violence will probably increase. We must pay our toll to the conveniences of life, and we shall of course compensate ourselves by a lower death-rate from diseases, many of which will no doubt in a hundred years’ time have disappeared from the planet.

If we need any motive power other than electricity, or if we need motive power of some other kind to produce electricity, no doubt the explosive recombination of oxygen and hydrogen, controlled by devices developed from existing gas-engines and petrol-engines, will be a starting-point: because coal will, probably before the complete exhaustion of the supply of it, have been found altogether too dirty and unhealthy a thing to use, at all events by way of combustion, though rumours are heard from time to time of new methods by which the stored energy of coal may be utilised directly, to the great economy of the material.[1] In all sorts of ways the early years of the century will be employing themselves in seeking out new sources of man’s chief necessity—power: and a hundred years hence we shall have entered upon the full inheritance of them.

But the obtaining of power is only one problem of the mechanician. Of almost equal, if not quite equal, importance is that of applying power at the place where it is needed, and the careful reader will not have overlooked the fact that while we have been discussing the use of electricity as a source of power we have already been anticipating, and perhaps anticipating a good deal. For, when we now speak of machinery and locomotive engines being “driven” by electricity, we are really only employing a sort of convenient periphrasis. All our electric machinery, all our electric railways, our “tuppeny” tubes and the horrible electric trams which make life almost intolerable in houses along many of the main roads out of London, are really driven by coal-burning steam engines. In a few places (especially in the Niagara valley) waterfall power is used. But whatever the real source of power, electricity is only a means, more or less convenient, of transmitting it. Even electric launches, and slow-going electric broughams driven by accumulators, only represent slightly more subtle examples of the electrical transmission of power. The ultimate source of power is always either a steam-engine or a waterfall. A few lecture-table toys and the like are the only existing examples of machinery in which the actual source of power is electricity. Even here, it may be objected, the actual source of power is not electricity, but chemical action in the battery. But no contrivance of man is an ultimate source of power. Even a steam-engine is only a device for utilising the stored solar energy of coal. Of course man can no more create power than he can create matter: the stock of each in the universe is a fixed quantity. All that we are able to do is to harness to our use a part of the cosmic store. When I speak of electricity becoming hereafter a “source” of power, I am merely distinguishing between its use as a means of transmitting force already perceived as force in some other form (as where a dynamo-electric machine receives motion from a steam-engine or waterfall and turns this motion into electricity, which is conveyed by wires or rails to an electric dynamic engine that reconverts it into motion) and its use as a primary means of utilising the cosmic stores of force.

Before we arrive, therefore, at the point of using electricity as a source of power in itself, our mechanicians will have plenty to occupy them in the task of devising safer and more convenient methods of transmitting force, and even at the end of the century, supposing the use of electricity not to have been entirely superseded by the discovery of some entirely new force as yet not even conceivable, invention will doubtless be still busy with further improvements in the transmission as well as in the production of electricity. It has been hinted that “wireless” transmission of power will no doubt by that time have become practicable, and Signor Marconi’s achievement of wireless telegraphy was mentioned as a proof that such transmission is at least imaginable. In Marconi’s invention an enormous electrical impulse is launched into the æther, and if the very smallest token of it can be “picked up” in any way at the receiving station, the wireless telegram is satisfactorily received. But the important fact for our present purpose is that some product of the original impulse can be picked up: and though the effort of imagination required to see in this a starting-point for entirely new inventions, capable of gathering up a practicable modicum of the transmitted power in a form capable of being converted into motion, is severe, we shall bring but a poor imaginative equipment to a task so colossal as that of guessing what the next century will be capable of if we refuse to believe that something in the nature of Hertzian waves, or something propagated as these are propagated, can be used to carry impulse to machinery at a distance from the source of power. The imaginative faculty which boggles at this effort will probably overlook the fact that the mere transmission is only a part of the difficulty which is pretty sure to have been overcome by this time next century. It will not be enough to launch waves capable of being used where they are intended to be used. We must also discover how to launch them so that they may be incapable of being used anywhere else. I read the other day the report of a police-court case in which a man was charged with “stealing electricity” (which seems a rather doubtful indictment from the point of view of the lawyer) by obtaining the use of a public telephone station without paying the usual fee. The electricians of a hundred years hence will certainly have to find out how to prevent the purloining of wireless force, and perhaps the police will have to devise means of detecting this at present somewhat recondite crime. This question of wireless transmission lies within the province of discovery rather than that of invention. Before it can receive actuality we have to do more than utilise existing knowledge: we have to acquire new knowledge.

In the meantime, portable energy will no doubt be achieved in ways other than electrical. Some very interesting compressed-air tools are already in limited use. Holes are drilled and rivets driven by little contrivances which have a store of force within themselves furnished by compressed air. One of the many uses of the cheap oxygen and hydrogen, and doubtless of cheaply liquefied gases of high-resisting power,[2] will no doubt be to work various kinds of machinery. This use of liquid airs has been much derided, and indeed a good deal of nonsense has been written as to its possibilities, drawing from a recent and accomplished writer the remark that “The statements which have sometimes appeared in the daily papers, announcing impending revolutions in the methods of obtaining cheap power by the application of liquid air, have originated from an imperfect comprehension of the problems involved.”[3]