A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD BY H. G. WELLS57.THE DEVELOPMENT OF MATERIAL KNOWLEDGE
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the opening years of the nineteenth century, while these conflicts of the powers and princes were going on in Europe, and the patchwork of the treaty of Westphalia (1648) was changing kaleidoscopically into the patchwork of the treaty of Vienna (1815), and while the sailing ship was spreading European influence throughout the world, a steady growth of knowledge and a general clearing up of men’s ideas about the world in which they lived was in progress in the European and Europeanized world.
It went on disconnected from political life, and producing throughout
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries no striking immediate results
in political life. Nor was it affecting popular thought very
profoundly during this period. These reactions were to come later, and
only in their full force in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
It was a process that went on chiefly in a small world of prosperous
and independent-spirited people. Without what the English call the
“private gentleman,” the scientific process could not have begun in
Greece, and could not have been renewed in Europe. The universities
played a part but not a leading part in the philosophical and
scientific thought of this period. Endowed learning is apt to be timid
and conservative learning, lacking in initiative and resistent to
innovation, unless it has the spur of contact with independent minds.
We have already noted the formation of the Royal Society in 1662 and
its work in realizing the dream of Bacon’s _New Atlantis_. Throughout
the eighteenth century there was much clearing up of general ideas
about matter and motion, much mathematical advance, a systematic
development of the use of optical glass in microscope and telescope, a
renewed energy in classificatory natural history, a great revival of
anatomical science. The science of geology—foreshadowed by Aristotle
and anticipated by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)—began its great task
of interpreting the Record of the Rocks.
The progress of physical science reacted upon metallurgy. Improved
metallurgy, affording the possibility of a larger and bolder handling
of masses of metal and other materials, reacted upon practical
inventions. Machinery on a new scale and in a new abundance appeared
to revolutionize industry.
In 1804 Trevithick adapted the Watt engine to transport and made the
first locomotive. In 1825 the first railway, between Stockton and
Darlington, was opened, and Stephenson’s “Rocket,” with a thirteen-ton
train, got up to a speed of forty-four miles per hour. From 1830
onward railways multiplied. By the middle of the century a network of
railways had spread all over Europe.
Here was a sudden change in what had long been a fixed condition of
human life, the maximum rate of land transport. After the Russian
disaster, Napoleon travelled from near Vilna to Paris in 312 hours.
This was a journey of about 1,400 miles. He was travelling with every
conceivable advantage, and he averaged under 5 miles an hour. An
ordinary traveller could not have done this distance in twice the time.
These were about the same maximum rates of travel as held good between
Rome and Gaul in the first century A.D. Then suddenly came this
tremendous change. The railways reduced this journey for any ordinary
traveller to less than forty-eight hours. That is to say, they reduced
the chief European distances to about a tenth of what they had been.
They made it possible to carry out administrative work in areas ten
times as great as any that had hitherto been workable under one
administration. The full significance of that possibility in Europe
still remains to be realized. Europe is still netted in boundaries
drawn in the horse and road era. In America the effects were
immediate. To the United States of America, sprawling westward, it
meant the possibility of a continuous access to Washington, however far
the frontier travelled across the continent. It meant unity, sustained
on a scale that would otherwise have been impossible.
The steamboat was, if anything, a little ahead of the steam engine in
its earlier phases. There was a steamboat, the _Charlotte Dundas_, on
the Firth of Clyde Canal in 1802, and in 1807 an American named Fulton
had a steamer, the Clermont, with British-built engines, upon the
Hudson River above New York. The first steamship to put to sea was
also an American, the Phœnix, which went from New York (Hoboken) to
Philadelphia. So, too, was the first ship using steam (she also had
sails) to cross the Atlantic, the Savannah (1819). All these were
paddle-wheel boats and paddle-wheel boats are not adapted to work in
heavy seas. The paddles smash too easily, and the boat is then
disabled. The screw steamship followed rather slowly. Many
difficulties had to be surmounted before the screw was a practicable
thing. Not until the middle of the century did the tonnage of
steamships upon the sea begin to overhaul that of sailing ships. After
that the evolution in sea transport was rapid. For the first time men
began to cross the seas and oceans with some certainty as to the date
of their arrival. The transatlantic crossing, which had been an
uncertain adventure of several weeks—which might stretch to months—was
accelerated, until in 1910 it was brought down, in the case of the
fastest boats, to under five days, with a practically notifiable hour
of arrival.
Concurrently with the development of steam transport upon land and sea
a new and striking addition to the facilities of human intercourse
arose out of the investigations of Volta, Galvani and Faraday into
various electrical phenomena. The electric telegraph came into
existence in 1835. The first underseas cable was laid in 1851 between
France and England. In a few years the telegraph system had spread over
the civilized world, and news which had hitherto travelled slowly from
point to point became practically simultaneous throughout the earth.
These things, the steam railway and the electric telegraph, were to the
popular imagination of the middle nineteenth century the most striking
and revolutionary of inventions, but they were only the most
conspicuous and clumsy first fruits of a far more extensive process.
Technical knowledge and skill were developing with an extraordinary
rapidity, and to an extraordinary extent measured by the progress of
any previous age. Far less conspicuous at first in everyday life, but
finally far more important, was the extension of man’s power over
various structural materials. Before the middle of the eighteenth
century iron was reduced from its ores by means of wood charcoal, was
handled in small pieces, and hammered and wrought into shape. It was
material for a craftsman. Quality and treatment were enormously
dependent upon the experience and sagacity of the individual
iron-worker. The largest masses of iron that could be dealt with under
those conditions amounted at most (in the sixteenth century) to two or
three tons. (There was a very definite upward limit, therefore, to the
size of cannon.) The blast-furnace rose in the eighteenth century and
developed with the use of coke. Not before the eighteenth century do
we find rolled sheet iron (1728) and rolled rods and bars (1783).
Nasmyth’s steam hammer came as late as 1838.
The ancient world, because of its metallurgical inferiority, could not
use steam. The steam engine, even the primitive pumping engine, could
not develop before sheet iron was available. The early engines seem to
the modern eye very pitiful and clumsy bits of ironmongery, but they
were the utmost that the metallurgical science of the time could do. As
late as 1856 came the Bessemer process, and presently (1864) the
open-hearth process, in which steel and every sort of iron could be
melted, purified and cast in a manner and upon a scale hitherto unheard
of. To-day in the electric furnace one may see tons of incandescent
steel swirling about like boiling milk in a saucepan. Nothing in the
previous practical advances of mankind is comparable in its
consequences to the complete mastery over enormous masses of steel and
iron and over their texture and quality which man has now achieved.
The railways and early engines of all sorts were the mere first
triumphs of the new metallurgical methods. Presently came ships of
iron and steel, vast bridges, and a new way of building with steel upon
a gigantic scale. Men realized too late that they had planned their
railways with far too timid a gauge, that they could have organized
their travelling with far more steadiness and comfort upon a much
bigger scale.
Before the nineteenth century there were no ships in the world much
over 2,000 tons burthen; now there is nothing wonderful about a
50,000-ton liner. There are people who sneer at this kind of progress
as being a progress in “mere size,” but that sort of sneering merely
marks the intellectual limitations of those who indulge in it. The
great ship or the steel-frame building is not, as they imagine, a
magnified version of the small ship or building of the past; it is a
thing different in kind, more lightly and strongly built, of finer and
stronger materials; instead of being a thing of precedent and
rule-of-thumb, it is a thing of subtle and intricate calculation. In
the old house or ship, matter was dominant—the material and its needs
had to be slavishly obeyed; in the new, matter had been captured,
changed, coerced. Think of the coal and iron and sand dragged out of
the banks and pits, wrenched, wrought, molten and cast, to be flung at
last, a slender glittering pinnacle of steel and glass, six hundred
feet above the crowded city!
We have given these particulars of the advance in man’s knowledge of
the metallurgy of steel and its results by way of illustration. A
parallel story could be told of the metallurgy of copper and tin, and
of a multitude of metals, nickel and aluminium to name but two, unknown
before the nineteenth century dawned. It is in this great and growing
mastery over substances, over different sorts of glass, over rocks and
plasters and the like, over colours and textures, that the main
triumphs of the mechanical revolution have thus far been achieved. Yet
we are still in the stage of the first fruits in the matter. We have
the power, but we have still to learn how to use our power. Many of
the first employments of these gifts of science have been vulgar,
tawdry, stupid or horrible. The artist and the adaptor have still
hardly begun to work with the endless variety of substances now at
their disposal.
Parallel with this extension of mechanical possibilities the new
science of electricity grew up. It was only in the eighties of the
nineteenth century that this body of enquiry began to yield results to
impress the vulgar mind. Then suddenly came electric light and
electric traction, and the transmutation of forces, the possibility of
sending power, that could be changed into mechanical motion or light or
heat as one chose, along a copper wire, as water is sent along a pipe,
began to come through to the ideas of ordinary people....
The British and French were at first the leading peoples in this great
proliferation of knowledge; but presently the Germans, who had learnt
humility under Napoleon, showed such zeal and pertinacity in scientific
enquiry as to overhaul these leaders. British science was largely the
creation of Englishmen and Scotchmen working outside the ordinary
centres of erudition.
The universities of Britain were at this time in a state of educational
retrogression, largely given over to a pedantic conning of the Latin
and Greek classics. French education, too, was dominated by the
classical tradition of the Jesuit schools, and consequently it was not
difficult for the Germans to organize a body of investigators, small
indeed in relation to the possibilities of the case, but large in
proportion to the little band of British and French inventors and
experimentalists. And though this work of research and experiment was
making Britain and France the most rich and powerful countries in the
world, it was not making scientific and inventive men rich and
powerful. There is a necessary unworldliness about a sincere
scientific man; he is too preoccupied with his research to plan and
scheme how to make money out of it. The economic exploitation of his
discoveries falls very easily and naturally, therefore, into the hands
of a more acquisitive type; and so we find that the crops of rich men
which every fresh phase of scientific and technical progress has
produced in Great Britain, though they have not displayed quite the
same passionate desire to insult and kill the goose that laid the
national golden eggs as the scholastic and clerical professions, have
been quite content to let that profitable creature starve. Inventors
and discoverers came by nature, they thought, for cleverer people to
profit by.
In this matter the Germans were a little wiser. The German “learned”
did not display the same vehement hatred of the new learning. They
permitted its development. The German business man and manufacturer
again had not quite the same contempt for the man of science as had his
British competitor. Knowledge, these Germans believed, might be a
cultivated crop, responsive to fertilizers. They did concede,
therefore, a certain amount of opportunity to the scientific mind;
their public expenditure on scientific work was relatively greater, and
this expenditure was abundantly rewarded. By the latter half of the
nineteenth century the German scientific worker had made German a
necessary language for every science student who wished to keep abreast
with the latest work in his department, and in certain branches, and
particularly in chemistry, Germany acquired a very great superiority
over her western neighbours. The scientific effort of the sixties and
seventies in Germany began to tell after the eighties, and the German
gained steadily upon Britain and France in technical and industrial
prosperity.
A fresh phase in the history of invention opened when in the eighties a
new type of engine came into use, an engine in which the expansive
force of an explosive mixture replaced the expansive force of steam.
The light, highly efficient engines that were thus made possible were
applied to the automobile, and developed at last to reach such a pitch
of lightness and efficiency as to render flight—long known to be
possible—a practical achievement. A successful flying machine—but not
a machine large enough to take up a human body—was made by Professor
Langley of the Smithsonian Institute of Washington as early as 1897.
By 1909 the aeroplane was available for human locomotion. There had
seemed to be a pause in the increase of human speed with the perfection
of railways and automobile road traction, but with the flying machine
came fresh reductions in the effective distance between one point of
the earth’s surface and another. In the eighteenth century the
distance from London to Edinburgh was an eight days’ journey; in 1918
the British Civil Air Transport Commission reported that the journey
from London to Melbourne, halfway round the earth, would probably in a
few years’ time be accomplished in that same period of eight days.
Too much stress must not be laid upon these striking reductions in the
time distances of one place from another. They are merely one aspect of
a much profounder and more momentous enlargement of human possibility.
The science of agriculture and agricultural chemistry, for instance,
made quite parallel advances during the nineteenth century. Men learnt
so to fertilize the soil as to produce quadruple and quintuple the
crops got from the same area in the seventeenth century. There was a
still more extraordinary advance in medical science; the average
duration of life rose, the daily efficiency increased, the waste of
life through ill-health diminished.
Now here altogether we have such a change in human life as to
constitute a fresh phase of history. In a little more than a century
this mechanical revolution has been brought about. In that time man
made a stride in the material conditions of his life vaster than he had
done during the whole long interval between the palæolithic stage and
the age of cultivation, or between the days of Pepi in Egypt and those
of George III. A new gigantic material framework for human affairs has
come into existence. Clearly it demands great readjustments of our
social, economical and political methods. But these readjustments have
necessarily waited upon the development of the mechanical revolution,
and they are still only in their opening stage to-day.