His figures brought him, he thought, to the year
1927; another generation to spare before force, space, and time
should meet. The ocean steamer ran the surest line of
triangulation into the future, because it was the nearest of
man's products to a unity; railroads taught less because they
seemed already finished except for mere increase in number;
explosives taught most, but needed a tribe of chemists,
physicists, and mathematicians to explain; the dynamo taught
least because it had barely reached infancy, and, if its progress
was to be constant at the rate of the last ten years, it would
result in infinite costless energy within a generation. One
lingered long among the dynamos, for they were new, and they gave
to history a new phase. Men of science could never understand the
ignorance and naivete; of the historian, who, when he came
suddenly on a new power, asked naturally what it was; did it pull
or did it push? Was it a screw or thrust? Did it flow or vibrate?
Was it a wire or a mathematical line? And a score of such
questions to which he expected answers and was astonished to get
none.
Education ran riot at Chicago, at least for retarded minds
which had never faced in concrete form so many matters of which
they were ignorant. Men who knew nothing whatever -- who had
never run a steam-engine, the simplest of forces -- who had never
put their hands on a lever -- had never touched an electric
battery -- never talked through a telephone, and had not the
shadow of a notion what amount of force was meant by a watt or an
ampere or an erg, or any other term of measurement introduced
within a hundred years -- had no choice but to sit down on the
steps and brood as they had never brooded on the benches of
Harvard College, either as student or professor, aghast at what
they had said and done in all these years, and still more ashamed
of the childlike ignorance and babbling futility of the society
that let them say and do it.
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