The rise of the great bubble was accompanied by the formation of hundreds of minor ones. Among these we will mention a few which are pertinent to the subject of this paper:
A wheel for perpetual motion. Capital, one million pounds.
For extracting silver from lead.
For the transmutation of quicksilver into a malleable fine metal.
Puckles Machine Company, for discharging round and square cannon balls and bullets, and making a total revolution in “the art of war.”
For carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, “but nobody to know what it is.”
It is estimated that the proposed capital for floating these and similar schemes was three hundred million pounds. We find, in the annals of the time, that the Duchess of Marlborough persuaded her husband, John Churchill, the great general, not to increase his holdings, and to sell his shares; he, like a sensible man, took a sensible woman’s advice and made one hundred thousand pounds. When we come to speak of the connection of women with modern delusions, we must remember this act of one of their sex.
At this time, nearly two hundred years after the singular outbreak of chimerical projects of Queen Anne’s reign, we can match some of these bubbles almost exactly; for have we not had the Keeley motor, the extraction of gold from salt water, and is there not great activity in making the wonder of the public over some advance in science a source of money-making? The unscientific person is certainly open to a new danger in the increasing tendency to promote enterprises based upon some new scientific discovery, and it behooves the followers of science to suggest a remedy for this growing evil. I shall endeavor to do my part in this paper in pointing out the necessity of some oracular medium—a scientific oracle of Delphos—to which the common man can repair and get trustworthy information, for it is a melancholy fact that such information can not be obtained from the daily press or from the literary magazines of the time.
Many of our newspapers draw such an income from their advertising columns that the editors are unwilling to print any criticism which would lead to the restriction of this source of gain; thus if a company promoting a scientific bubble should advertise liberally in a leading newspaper, the editors are usually loath to insert an article upon the scheme, for the printing of the criticism might lead to the withdrawal of the advertisement. It is possible that the editors of such daily papers have not overmuch confidence in the judgment of scientific men, for have not the latter often been mistaken? There was Lardner, who prophesied that steamships could not cross the Atlantic, but we must remember that Lardner was not a scientific man; he was a popularizer of science, and never made a scientific investigation. It is said that there have been college professors who have denied the possibility of sending messages under the ocean. This I also doubt, for I am a witness in the flesh of the way such stories can arise. Not long since I was invited to speak before a commercial club, and the presiding officer, in introducing me, remarked: “The professor will now address you on the advances in electricity. When I was in college I well remember his describing an electric motor and his remark that it would never become a practical invention.” There was, of course, laughter, and the president sat down with a comfortable air of having made a point. The professor pointed out that the presiding officer graduated before he became professor in the university, and before the Gramme machine and the electric motor were invented. Nevertheless, the world loves to believe in the inaccuracy of the accurate, and even a sophomore takes infinite delight in discovering arithmetical mistakes in an edition of Newton’s Principia.
I mention this proneness to believe that scientific men are apt to be mistaken, for it is a blame laid at their doors often by the promoters of scientific bubbles, and for a very easily understood reason, and the editors of newspapers and literary magazines can ease their consciences after publishing sensational scientific articles by reflecting on the fallibility of the followers of science. Lawyers and judges, too, make their mistakes; nevertheless, we continue to resort to them for advice; and few editors, I imagine, would dare to publish a legal opinion without consulting an authority in law. Yet we read every day so-called scientific articles in newspapers and magazines which have evidently never been submitted to competent critics. Have we not read statements of the possibility of exploding powder magazines on board ships by electric waves; of the manufacture of liquid air without the expenditure of energy; of electricity direct from coal; papers on the nebular theory, more nebulous than any nebula yet discovered? When we read a broad sheet in the morning paper setting forth a glowing scheme to manufacture power out of nothing, to what oracle can we repair to ascertain the truth? It is true that common sense might lead the reader to reflect that when he is told that the shares can now be obtained for five dollars, but in a short time they will be advanced to ten dollars, and now is the time to invest, that such good things are quickly taken up without the necessity of advertising. When the morning mail brings a prospectus of a company formed to make diamonds by electricity, a company with ten million dollars capital (why not one hundred millions?), to whom should one go to allay the fever of sudden gain? While men and women will carefully consider which line of steamships to Europe is the best equipped with engines, the efficiency of which depends upon the laws that prove the impossibility of perpetual motion, they enter at the same time upon schemes to obtain power without the consumption of work.