The World Set Free Read online

  law-making, propitiating, enslaving, conquering, exterminating,

  and every little increment in Power, he turned at once and always

  turns to the purposes of this confused elaborate struggle to

  socialise. To incorporate and comprehend his fellow men into a

  community of purpose became the last and greatest of his

  instincts. Already before the last polished phase of the stone

  age was over he had become a political animal. He made

  astonishingly far-reaching discoveries within himself, first of

  counting and then of writing and making records, and with that

  his town communities began to stretch out to dominion; in the

  valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and the great Chinese rivers,

  the first empires and the first written laws had their

  beginnings. Men specialised for fighting and rule as soldiers and

  knights. Later, as ships grew seaworthy, the Mediterranean which

  had been a barrier became a highway, and at last out of a tangle

  of pirate polities came the great struggle of Carthage and Rome.

  The history of Europe is the history of the victory and breaking

  up of the Roman Empire. Every ascendant monarch in Europe up to

  the last, aped Caesar and called himself Kaiser or Tsar or

  Imperator or Kasir-i-Hind. Measured by the duration of human life

  it is a vast space of time between that first dynasty in Egypt

  and the coming of the aeroplane, but by the scale that looks back

  to the makers of the eoliths, it is all of it a story of

  yesterday.

  Now during this period of two hundred centuries or more, this

  period of the warring states, while men's minds were chiefly

  preoccupied by politics and mutual aggression, their progress in

  the acquirement of external Power was slow-rapid in comparison

  with the progress of the old stone age, but slow in comparison

  with this new age of systematic discovery in which we live. They

  did not very greatly alter the weapons and tactics of warfare,

  the methods of agriculture, seamanship, their knowledge of the

  habitable globe, or the devices and utensils of domestic life

  between the days of the early Egyptians and the days when

  Christopher Columbus was a child. Of course, there were

  inventions and changes, but there were also retrogressions;

  things were found out and then forgotten again; it was, on the

  whole, a progress, but it contained no steps; the peasant life

  was the same, there were already priests and lawyers and town

  craftsmen and territorial lords and rulers doctors, wise women,

  soldiers and sailors in Egypt and China and Assyria and

  south-eastern Europe at the beginning of that period, and they

  were doing much the same things and living much the same life as

  they were in Europe in A.D. 1500. The English excavators of the

  year A.D. 1900 could delve into the remains of Babylon and Egypt

  and disinter legal documents, domestic accounts, and family

  correspondence that they could read with the completest sympathy.

  There were great religious and moral changes throughout the

  period, empires and republics replaced one another, Italy tried a

  vast experiment in slavery, and indeed slavery was tried again

  and again and failed and failed and was still to be tested again

  and rejected again in the New World; Christianity and

  Mohammedanism swept away a thousand more specialised cults, but

  essentially these were progressive adaptations of mankind to

  material conditions that must have seemed fixed for ever. The

  idea of revolutionary changes in the material conditions of life

  would have been entirely strange to human thought through all

  that time.

  Yet the dreamer, the story-teller, was there still, waiting for

  his opportunity amidst the busy preoccupations, the comings and

  goings, the wars and processions, the castle building and

  cathedral building, the arts and loves, the small diplomacies and

  incurable feuds, the crusades and trading journeys of the middle

  ages. He no longer speculated with the untrammelled freedom of

  the stone-age savage; authoritative explanations of everything

  barred his path; but he speculated with a better brain, sat idle

  and gazed at circling stars in the sky and mused upon the coin

  and crystal in his hand. Whenever there was a certain leisure for

  thought throughout these times, then men were to be found

  dissatisfied with the appearances of things, dissatisfied with

  the assurances of orthodox belief, uneasy with a sense of unread

  symbols in the world about them, questioning the finality of

  scholastic wisdom. Through all the ages of history there were

  men to whom this whisper had come of hidden things about them.

  They could no longer lead ordinary lives nor content themselves

  with the common things of this world once they had heard this

  voice. And mostly they believed not only that all this world was

  as it were a painted curtain before things unguessed at, but that

  these secrets were Power. Hitherto Power had come to men by

  chance, but now there were these seekers seeking, seeking among

  rare and curious and perplexing objects, sometimes finding some

  odd utilisable thing, sometimes deceivingthemselves with fancied

  discovery, sometimes pretending to find. The world of every day

  laughed at these eccentric beings, or found them annoying and

  ill-treated them, or was seized with fear and made saints and

  sorcerers and warlocks of them, or with covetousness and

  entertained them hopefully; but for the greater part heeded them

  not at all. Yet they were of the blood of him who had first

  dreamt of attacking the mammoth; every one of them was of his

  blood and descent; and the thing they sought, all unwittingly,

  was the snare that will some day catch the sun.

  Section 3

  Such a man was that Leonardo da Vinci, who went about the court

  of Sforza in Milan in a state of dignified abstraction. His

  common-place books are full of prophetic subtlety and ingenious

  anticipations of the methods of the early aviators. Durer was his

  parallel and Roger Bacon-whom the Franciscans silenced-of his

  kindred. Such a man again in an earlier city was Hero of

  Alexandria, who knew of the power of steam nineteen hundred years

  before it was first brought into use. And earlier still was

  Archimedes of Syracuse, and still earlier the legendary Daedalus

  of Cnossos. All up and down the record of history whenever there

  was a little leisure from war and brutality the seekers appeared.

  And half the alchemists were of their tribe.

  When Roger Bacon blew up his first batch of gunpowder one might

  have supposed that men would have gone at once to the explosive

  engine. But they could see nothing of the sort. They were not

  yet beginning to think of seeing things; their metallurgy was all

  too poor to make such engines even had they thought of them. For

  a time they could not make instruments sound enough to stand this

  new force even for so rough a purpose as hurling a missile. Their

  first guns had barrels of coopered timber, and the world waited

  for mor
e than five hundred years before the explosive engine

  came.

  Even when the seekers found, it was at first a long journey

  before the world could use their findings for any but the

  roughest, most obvious purposes. If man in general was not still

  as absolutely blind to the unconquered energies about him as his

  paleolithic precursor, he was at best purblind.

  Section 4

  The latent energy of coal and the power of steam waited long on

  the verge of discovery, before they began to influence human

  lives.

  There were no doubt many such devices as Hero's toys devised and

  forgotten, time after time, in courts and palaces, but it needed

  that coal should be mined and burning with plenty of iron at hand

  before it dawned upon men that here was something more than a

  curiosity. And it is to be remarked that the first recorded

  suggestion for the use of steam was in war; there is an

  Elizabethan pamphlet in which it is proposed to fire shot out of

  corked iron bottles full of heated water. The mining of coal for

  fuel, the smelting of iron upon a larger scale than men had ever

  done before, the steam pumping engine, the steam-engine and the

  steam-boat, followed one another in an order that had a kind of

  logical necessity. It is the most interesting and instructive

  chapter in the history of the human intelligence, the history of

  steam from its beginning as a fact in human consciousness to the

  perfection of the great turbine engines that preceded the

  utilisation of intra-molecular power. Nearly every human being

  must have seen steam, seen it incuriously for many thousands of

  years; the women in particular were always heating water, boiling

  it, seeing it boil away, seeing the lids of vessels dance with

  its fury; millions of people at different times must have watched

  steam pitching rocks out of volcanoes like cricket balls and

  blowing pumice into foam, and yet you may search the whole human

  record through, letters, books, inscriptions, pictures, for any

  glimmer of a realisation that here was force, here was strength

  to borrow and use… Then suddenly man woke up to it, the

  railways spread like a network over the globe, the ever enlarging

  iron steamships began their staggering fight against wind and

  wave.

  Steam was the first-comer in the new powers, it was the beginning

  of the Age of Energy that was to close the long history of the

  Warring States.

  But for a long time men did not realise the importance of this

  novelty. They would not recognise, they were not able to

  recognise that anything fundamental had happened to their

  immemorial necessities. They called the steam-engine the 'iron

  horse' and pretended that they had made the most partial of

  substitutions. Steam machinery and factory production were

  visibly revolutionising the conditions of industrial production,

  population was streaming steadily in from the country-side and

  concentrating in hitherto unthought-of masses about a few city

  centres, food was coming to them over enormous distances upon a

  scale that made the one sole precedent, the corn ships of

  imperial Rome, a petty incident; and a huge migration of peoples

  between Europe and Western Asia and America was in Progress,

  and-nobody seems to have realised that something new had come

  into human life, a strange swirl different altogether from any

  previous circling and mutation, a swirl like the swirl when at

  last the lock gates begin to open after a long phase of

  accumulating water and eddying inactivity…

  The sober Englishman at the close of the nineteenth century could

  sit at his breakfast-table, decide between tea from Ceylon or

  coffee from Brazil, devour an egg from France with some Danish

  ham, or eat a New Zealand chop, wind up his breakfast with a West

  Indian banana, glance at the latest telegrams from all the world,

  scrutinise the prices current of his geographically distributed

  investments in South Africa, Japan, and Egypt, and tell the two

  children he had begotten (in the place of his father's eight)

  that he thought the world changed very little. They must play

  cricket, keep their hair cut, go to the old school he had gone

  to, shirk the lessons he had shirked, learn a few scraps of

  Horace and Virgil and Homer for the confusion of cads, and all

  would be well with them…

  Section 5

  Electricity, though it was perhaps the earlier of the two to be

  studied, invaded the common life of men a few decades after the

  exploitation of steam. To electricity also, in spite of its

  provocative nearness all about him, mankind had been utterly

  blind for incalculable ages. Could anything be more emphatic than

  the appeal of electricity for attention? It thundered at man's

  ears, it signalled to him in blinding flashes, occasionally it

  killed him, and he could not see it as a thing that concerned him

  enough to merit study. It came into the house with the cat on any

  dry day and crackled insinuatingly whenever he stroked her fur.

  It rotted his metals when he put them together… There is no

  single record that any one questioned why the cat's fur crackles

  or why hair is so unruly to brush on a frosty day, before the

  sixteenth century. For endless years man seems to have done his

  very successful best not to think about it at all; until this new

  spirit of the Seeker turned itself to these things.

  How often things must have been seen and dismissed as

  unimportant, before the speculative eye and the moment of vision

  came! It was Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth's court physician, who

  first puzzled his brains with rubbed amber and bits of glass and

  silk and shellac, and so began the quickening of the human mind

  to the existence of this universal presence. And even then the

  science of electricity remained a mere little group of curious

  facts for nearly two hundred years, connected perhaps with

  magnetism-a mere guess that-perhaps with the lightning. Frogs'

  legs must have hung by copper hooks from iron railings and

  twitched upon countless occasions before Galvani saw them.

  Except for the lightning conductor, it was 250 years after

  Gilbert before electricity stepped out of the cabinet of

  scientific curiosities into the life of the common man… Then

  suddenly, in the half-century between 1880 and 1930, it ousted

  the steam-engine and took over traction, it ousted every other

  form of household heating, abolished distance with the perfected

  wireless telephone and the telephotograph…

  Section 6

  And there was an extraordinary mental resistance to discovery and

  invention for at least a hundred years after the scientific

  revolution had begun. Each new thing made its way into practice

  against a scepticism that amounted at times to hostility. One

  writer upon these subjects gives a funny little domestic

  conversation that happened, he says, in the year 1898, within ten

  years, that is to say, of the time when the first aviators were

  fairl
y on the wing. He tells us how he sat at his desk in his

  study and conversed with his little boy.

  His little boy was in profound trouble. He felt he had to speak

  very seriously to his father, and as he was a kindly little boy

  he did not want to do it too harshly.

  This is what happened.

  'I wish, Daddy,' he said, coming to his point, 'that you wouldn't

  write all this stuff about flying. The chaps rot me.'

  'Yes!' said his father.

  'And old Broomie, the Head I mean, he rots me. Everybody rots

  me.'

  'But there is going to be flying-quite soon.'

  The little boy was too well bred to say what he thought of that.

  'Anyhow,' he said, 'I wish you wouldn't write about it.'

  'You'll fly-lots of times-before you die,' the father assured

  him.

  The little boy looked unhappy.

  The father hesitated. Then he opened a drawer and took out a

  blurred and under-developed photograph. 'Come and look at this,'

  he said.

  The little boy came round to him. The photograph showed a stream

  and a meadow beyond, and some trees, and in the air a black,

  pencil-like object with flat wings on either side of it. It was

  the first record of the first apparatus heavier than air that

  ever maintained itself in the air by mechanical force. Across the

  margin was written: 'Here we go up, up, up-from S. P. Langley,

  Smithsonian Institution, Washington.'

  The father watched the effect of this reassuring document upon

  his son. 'Well?' he said.

  'That,' said the schoolboy, after reflection, 'is only a model.'

  'Model to-day, man to-morrow.'

  The boy seemed divided in his allegiance. Then he decided for

  what he believed quite firmly to be omniscience. 'But old

  Broomie,' he said, 'he told all the boys in his class only

  yesterday, "no man will ever fly." No one, he says, who has ever

  shot grouse or pheasants on the wing would ever believe anything

  of the sort…'

  Yet that boy lived to fly across the Atlantic and edit his

  father's reminiscences.

  Section 7

  At the close of the nineteenth century as a multitude of passages

  in the literature of that time witness, it was thought that the

  fact that man had at last had successful and profitable dealings

  with the steam that scalded him and the electricity that flashed

  and banged about the sky at him, was an amazing and perhaps a