Edward Huntington Williams

“ Each wavelet seems eager to hurry on to the full fruition of the cataract. It lashes with angry foam each chance obstruction, and gurgles its disapproval in ever-changing measures. Even to the most thoughtless observer the mighty current thus unchained attests the sublimity of almost irresistible power. Could a mighty mill-wheel be adjusted in that dizzy current, what labors might it not perform? Five million tons of water rush down this decline each hour, we are told; and the force that thus goes to waste is as if three million unbridled horses exhausted their strength in ceaseless plunging. ”

“ The most significant [187] thing that strikes the eye is a row of great mushroom-like affairs, for all the world like giant tops, that stand spinning—and spinning. These great tops are about a dozen feet in diameter. They are whirling, so we are told, at a rate of two hundred and fifty revolutions per minute. Hour after hour they spin on, never varying in speed, never faltering; day and night are alike to them, and one day is like another. They are as ceaselessly active, as unwearying as Niagara itself, whose power they symbolize; and, like the great Falls, they murmur exultingly as they work. ”

“ It is nothing less than pitiful to contemplate in imagination our great-great-grandmothers—and all their forebears of the long centuries—drudging away day after day, year in and year out, at the ceaseless task of spinning and weaving—only to produce, as the output of a lifetime of labor, a quantity of cloth equivalent perhaps to what our perfected machine, driven by steam, and manipulated by a factory girl, produces each working hour of every day. ”

“ After all, Nature is not so malevolent as at first glance she seems. She has opposed man at every stage of his attempted progress; yet at the same time she has supplied him all his weapons for waging war upon her. Her great power of gravitation opposes every effort he makes; yet without that same power he could do nothing—he could not walk or stay upon the earth even; and no structure that he builds would hold in place for an instant. ”

“ There will be no dearth of incident to claim his attention in the way of wars and conquests, and changing creeds, and the rise and fall of nations, each pursuing virtually the same course of growth and decay as all the others. But when he comes to the close of the eighteenth century, it will not be the social paroxysm of a nation, or the meteoric career of a Napoleon that will claim his attention so much as the introduction of that new method of utilizing the powers of Nature which found its expression in the mechanism called the steam engine. ”

“ Almost since the time when the Falls were first viewed by a white man the idea of utilizing their powers has been dreamed of. But until our own day—until the last decade—science had not shown a way in which the great current could be economically shackled. A few puny mill-wheels have indeed revolved for thirty years or so, but these were of no greater significance than the thousands of others driven by mountain streams or by the currents of ordinary rivers. But about a decade ago the engineering skill of the world was placed in commission, and to-day Niagara is fairly in harness. ”

“ Electricity is, of course, the great revolutionary factor in modern mining. There is scarcely a department of mining in which electric power has not wrought revolutionary changes in recent years; and the subject has become so important and so thoroughly specialized as to "create a literature and a technology of its own." From the electric drill, working hundreds of feet below the surface of the earth, to the delicate testing-instruments in the laboratory of the assaying offices, the effect of this electrical revolution is being felt progressively more and more every year. ”

“ THE STORY OF THE STEAM ENGINE We come now to that all-important transformer of power, the steam engine. Everybody knows that steam is a state of water in which, under the influence of heat, the molecules have broken away from the mutual attraction of cohesion, and are flying about at inconceivable speed, rebounding from one another after collision, in virtue of their elasticity, exerting in the aggregate an enormous pressure in every direction. ”

“ But gravitation submits to no such restrictions. It eludes all of our senses, and it absolutely disregards all barriers. To its catholic taste all substances are alike. It holds in bondage every particle of matter in the universe, and can enforce its influence over every kind of atom with an impartiality that is as astounding as it is inexorable. Moreover, this weird force, gravitation, has thus far evaded all man's efforts to classify or label it. ”

“ There are men living to-day who were born in that epoch when the steam engine was for the first time used to turn the wheels of factories. There are many men who can well remember the first practical application of steam to railway traffic. Hosts of men can remember when the first commercial message was transmitted by electricity along a wire. Even middle-aged men recall the first cable message that linked the old world with the new. And the application of the dynamo to the purposes of the world's work is an affair of but yesterday. ”

“ No man has the slightest inkling as to what gravitation really is. If, as you glance at these lines, you should chance to release your hold and allow the volume to drop to the floor, you will have performed a miracle which no scientist in the world can even vaguely explain.
As regards our electric train, then, the fact that it stands there firmly, held fast to the rails by gravitation, is in reality as great and as inexplicable a marvel as the fact that the electric current gives it propulsion. ”

“ No stone can be lifted above another, to make the crudest wall or dwelling, but Nature—represented by her power of gravitation—strives at once to pull it down again. No structure is completed before the [4] elements are at work defacing it, preparing its slow but certain ruin. Summer heat and winter cold expand and contract materials of every kind; rain and wind wear and warp and twist; the oxygen of the air gnaws into stone and iron alike;—in a word, all the elements are at work undoing what man has accomplished. ”

“ Moreover, it is otherwise entitled to precedence, for even to-day, in this so-called age of steam and electricity, the muscular system remains by far the most important of all machines. In the United States alone there are some twenty million horses doing work for man; and of course no machine of any sort is ever put in motion or continues indefinitely in operation without aid supplied by human muscles. All in all, then, it is impossible to overestimate the importance of this muscular machine which is at once the oldest and the most lasting of all systems of utilizing energy. ”

“ There are eleven of these great turbine mechanisms, each with a supplying funnel of water and a revolving shaft extending upward to its companion dynamo, in the room in which we stand. Energy representing fifty-five thousand horse-power is incessantly transformed and made available for man's use in the subterranean building in which we stand. And there is not a pound of coal, not a lick of flame, not an atom of steam involved in the transformation. ”

“ It is estimated that a little pea-sized fragment of radium has energy enough in store—could we but learn to use it—to drive the largest steamship across the ocean—taking the place of hundreds of tons of coal as now employed. The mechanics of the future must learn how to unlock this treasury of the molecule; how to get at these atomic and corpuscular forces, the very existence of which was unknown to science until yesterday. The generation that has learned that secret will look back upon the fuel problems of our day somewhat as we regard the flint and steel and the open fire of the barbarian. ”

“ For within these walls, by a miracle of modern science, the potential energy which resides in the water of the canal is transformed into an electrical current which is sent out over a network of wires to distant cities to perform a thousand necromantic tasks,—propelling a street car in one place, effecting chemical decompositions in another; turning the wheels of a factory here and lighting the streets of a city there; in short, subserving the practical needs of man in devious and wonderful ways. ”

“ The more one considers the mechanism, the more one must marvel at the ingenuity of the pre-historic man who invented the wheel and axle. Its utility is sufficiently obvious once the thing has been done. In point of fact, it so enormously reduces the friction that a man may convey ten times the burden with its aid that he can without it. But how was the primitive man, with his small knowledge of mechanics, to predict such a result? ”

“ Scarcely had the world begun to adjust itself to the new conditions of the Age of Steam, when yet another power was made subservient to man's needs, and the Age of Steam was supplemented, not to say supplanted, by the Age of Electricity. Of course the new progressive movements did not necessarily imply elimination of old conditions; they imply merely the subordination of old powers to newer and better ones. Stone implements by no means ceased to have utility at once when metal implements came into vogue. Bronze long held its own against iron, and still has its utility. ”

“ We know that the power to contract is the one universal attribute of living protoplasm. This power is equally wonderful and equally inexplicable, whether manifested in the case of the muscle cell or in the case of such a formless single-celled creature as the amœba. When we know more of molecular and atomic force, we may perhaps be able to form a mental picture of what goes on in the structure of protoplasm when it thus changes the shape of its mass. Until then, we must be content to accept the fact as being the vital one upon which all the movements of animate creatures depend. ”

“ It introduced human slavery in its production; and, after the experience of several thousand years, it caused the abolition of slavery upon the discovery that the freeman was a better property-making machine." If, then, we recall that without labor there is no property, we shall be in an attitude of mind to appreciate the importance of our subject; we shall realize, somewhat beyond the bounds of its more tangible and sordid relations, the essential dignity, the fundamental importance—in a word, the true meaning—of Work. ”

“ If one arm of the lever is ten times as long as the other, the power of one pound will lift or balance a ten-pound weight; if the one arm is a thousand times as long as the other the power of one pound will lift or balance a thousand pounds. If the long arm of the lever could be made some millions of miles in length, the power that a man could exert would balance the earth.
How fully Archimedes realized the possibilities of the lever is illustrated in the classical remark attributed to him, that, had he but a fulcrum on which to place his lever, he could move the world. ”

“ You go to your business in an electric car; ascend to your office in an electric elevator; utilize electric call-bells; receive and transmit messages about the world and beneath the sea by electric telegraph. Your doctor treats you with an electric battery. Your dentist employs electric drills and electric furnaces. You ride in electric cabs; eat food cooked on electric stoves; and read with the aid of electric light. In a word, the manifestations of electricity are so obvious on every side that there can be no challenge to the phrasing which has christened this the Age of Electricity. ”