A Child's History of the World

by V. M. Hillyer

But if a man who lived at that time should come back to earth now he would think this the Age of Miracles.

If he heard you talk over a wire to a person a thousand miles away, he would think you a magician.

If you showed him people moving and acting on a movie screen, he would think you a witch.

If he heard you start a band playing by turning on a phonograph, he would think you a devil.

If he saw you fly through the air in an airplane, he would think you a god.

We are so used to the telephone, telegraph, and phonograph; to steamboats, steam railroads, and trolley-cars; to electric lights, motor-cars, moving pictures, radio, and airplanes, that it is hard to imagine a world in which there were none of these things—absolutely none of these things. Yet in the Year 1800 not a single one of these inventions was known.

Neither George Washington nor Napoleon ever saw a steam-engine, a steam-car, nor a steamboat. They had never used a telephone nor a telegraph nor a bicycle. My own grandfather never saw a trolley-car nor an electric light. Even my father never saw a phonograph, a moving picture, an automobile, nor a flying-machine.

More wonders have been made in the last hundred years than in all the previous centuries of the world put together.

A Scotchman named James Watt was one of the first of these magicians whom we call inventors. Watt had watched a boiling kettle on the stove and noticed that the steam lifted the lid. This gave him an idea that steam might lift other things as well as the lid of a tea-kettle. So he made a machine in which steam lifted a lid called a piston in such a way as to turn a wheel. This was the first steam-engine.

Watt’s steam-engine moved wheels and other things, but it didn’t move itself. An Englishman named Stephenson put Watt’s engine on wheels and made the engine move its own wheels. This was the first locomotive. Soon funny-looking carriages drawn by funny-looking engines were made to run on tracks in America. At first these trains ran only a few miles out from such cities as Baltimore and Philadelphia.