James W. Steele

“ THE DYNAMO.--To the man who has been all his life thinking of the steam engine as the highest and almost only embodiment of controlled mechanical power, another machine, both supplementary to the steam engine and far excelling it, whose familiar burring sound is now heard in almost every village in the United States and has become the characteristic sound of modern civilization, must constitute a source of continual question and surprise. To be accustomed to the dynamo, to look upon it as a matter of course and a conceded fact, one must have come to years of maturity and found it here. ”

“ So it is that beauty and grandeur have never been so nearly akin elsewhere as they are in Colorado. Of nooks and corners and little valleys and waterfalls grotesque shapes there are almost thousands. One may sit at a car window all day, not knowing precisely where he is, or caring, and catch them as they pass and come and go, until his soul is tired. Yet it is all on a scale of inconceivable immensity. Even the mesas and tablelands, where the grass grows as on a lowland farm, are 4,000 to 6,000 feet above the sea—more than twice as high as Mount Everett. There is nothing low. ”

“ To know has become a part of the sum of life; to understand or to abandon is the rule. When the ages of tradition, of assertion without the necessity for proof, of content with all that was and was right or true because it was a standard fixed, went by, the age not necessarily of steam, or of steel, or of electricity, but the age of thought, came in. Some of the results of this thought, in one of the most prominent of its departments, I shall attempt to describe.
A wire is the usual concomitant in all electrical phenomena. It is almost the universally used conductor of the current. ”

“ The grandeur is over all; the overpowering sentiment of the vast domain. Yet in all her nooks and corners nestles the other—beauty beyond compare. When one looks for the first time upon the Rampart range, fencing the western rim of that vast undulating plain like a wall, it is impossible for him to imagine Manitou and Ute Pass and Cheyenne Cañon and the road to the Garden of the Gods, nestling there so near at hand beneath the cold dome of Pike’s Peak. ”

“ No one who has seen a steel-mill in operation, can go away and really write a description of it; no artist or camera has ever made its portrait, yet it is the most impressive scene of the modern, the industrial, world. There is a "fervent heat," surpassing in its impressions all the descriptions of the Bible, and which destroys all doubt of fire with capacity to burn a world and "roll the heavens together as a scroll." There is a clang and clatter accompanying a marvelous order. There are clouds of steam. There are displays of sparks and glow surpassing all the pyrotechnics of art. ”

“ The Age of Bronze and all other ages that have preceded ours lacked the great essentials that insure perpetuity. The Age of Steel, that came last, that is ours now; a degenerate time by all ancient standards; has for its crowning triumph a single machine which is alone enough to satisfy the union of two names that are to us what Caster and Pollux were to the bronze-armed Roman legions of the heroic time--the modern power printing-press. ”

“ The restlessness, the tinkle, the indescribable sound of breaking foam, the overhanging shadow, the glimpse of the far blue sky above and far beyond, the sense that this is nature, careless utterly of you and all your tribe—all these things are left out. To be amid these scenes is to live in a new way during the fleeting time that one is there, and going away again it is to remember more vividly after ten or twenty years than you did the day after you saw them first.
Scores of places are not in the guidebooks at all that strike the casual stranger as vividly as anything that is. ”

“ A thousand generations had lived and died, an immense volume of history had been enacted, the heroes of all the ages, and almost those of our own time, had fulfilled their destinies and passed away, before it came about that a mere physical fact should fill a larger place in our lives than all examples, and that the evanescent vapor which we call steam should change daily, and effectively, the courses and modes of human action, and erect life upon another plane. ”

“ When the Colorado visitor comes for the first time he is fortunate if his approach is by one of those lines whose trains, like those of the Burlington, come careering across the high plains from the eastward at an hour that shows the notched and serrated mountain wall against the sky. There is no other mountain approach in the world like that to Colorado from the east. Here is the sudden ending of that wide and silent vastness in which the modern traveler now lives less than twenty-four hours, but which the old-time wanderer dwelt in for more than a month. ”

“ Nearly a century passed between the making of the first practical engine and that one which now stands as the type of many thousands. But now every little saw-mill in the American woods could have, and finally did have, its little cheap, unscientific, powerful and non-vacuum engine, set up and worked without experience, and maintained in working order by an unskilled laborer. A thousand uses for steam grew out of this experiment of a Yankee who knew no better than to tempt fate with a high-pressure and speed and recklessness that has now become almost universal. ”

“ Endowed with a beauty of fascinating awfulness, and with still another beauty that underlies the magnitude and sits serene amid the grandeur, the inadequate, word-trammeled idea of it has found endless expression, and yet the scenes of Colorado have never been described. Whoever has visited her ever after turns aside from words; whoever has not, can obtain from them but a faint conception of that which in truth can be imagined only in actual presence—and hardly even then. ”

“ Yet he finally stood before mankind the companion of princes, the darling of splendid women, covered with the laurels of a brilliant scientific renown. But he was a printer, a tinkerer with stoves, the inventor of the lightning rod, the man who had spent one-half his life in teaching apprentices, such as he himself had been when his jealous and common-minded brother had whipped him, that "time is money," that "credit is money"--which is the most prominent fact in the commercial world of 1895--and that honor and self-respect are better than wealth, pleasure, or any other good. ”

“ The means by which this is accomplished is ingenious and surprising, since it means that the supply of electricity over a wire--seemingly the most subtle and elusive essence on earth--may be controlled like a stream from a cock, or the gas out of a burner. But this reduction of the current that makes the red glow in the clusters in a theater is by no means the only instance. The trolley-car, and even the common motor, may be made to start very slowly, and the unseen current whose touch kills is fed to its consumer at will. ”

“ To reach this mountain world, ending abruptly at the plain, is a surprise. Let one ray of sunshine lie upon a peak, far in the distance, and it is known that the fleecy texture of a cloud could not give back that peculiar glint, cold and bright and half a frown, and that these huge shapes are, at last, the Rocky Mountains. Such a glimpse may not occur to the railway traveler once in a hundred journeys, but if seen it is a suggestion of the spires that Bunyan saw ”

“ The ponderous iron pieces seem to weigh nothing. There is a feeling that one might hinder the movement as he would that of a watch. There is an inability to realize the fact that one of the mightiest forces of nature is there embodied in an easy, gliding, noiseless impulse. Yet it is one that would push aside massy tons of dead weight, that would almost unimpeded crush a hole through the enclosing wall, that whirls upon the rails the drivers of a locomotive weighing sixty tons as though there were no weight above them, no bite upon the rails. ”

“ The Manitou Grand Caverns have been discovered and opened, precisely as though nature had not been lavish enough before, and must needs do some other brilliant thing through man’s accident and luck. Wagon roads have been graded in all directions, and from one famous place to another, until there is no pleasure ground in America, possibly in the world, so well equipped for out-of-doors pleasure in a climate that has no vicissitudes, and amid remarkable scenes that have been clustered around this one favored spot with a profusion unknown elsewhere in all the civilized world. ”

“ Tesla, in some of his most wonderful experiments, seems almost to have touched the boundaries of an unexplored realm, yet not quite, not yet, and most likely absolute discovery can no farther go. To play upon those known laws--to twist them to new utilities and give them new developments--has been the work of the creators of all the modern electrical miracles. There is scarcely a field in which men work in which the results are not more apparent, yet all we have, and undoubtedly most we shall ever have, of electricity we shall continue to owe to the infant period of the science. ”

“ The mines and mining interests of Colorado are immense. They form a special feature, and about them there is already an extensive literature. It is the richest mineral region in the world, a fact illustrated by the ease with which it can turn from silver to gold, calling itself the “Silver State” for a period of years, and producing in a year immediately succeeding more than thirty millions of gold. Through all these wanderings, in every nook and corner, are the mines. The country is known truly and in detail by but one class—the prospectors. ”