James W. Steele

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ He was the first inventor of a practical machine, for a useful purpose, with which electricity had to do. That machine was the lightning-rod. Whatever its purpose, mankind will not forget the simple greatness of the act. At this writing the statue of Franklin stands looking upward at the sky, a key in his extended hand, in the portico of a palace which contains the completest and most beautiful display of electrical appliances that was ever brought together, at the dawn of that Age of Electricity which will be noon with us within one decade. ”

“ 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 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 big iron field magnet, often weighing some thousands of pounds, is then the same as a permanent steel horseshoe magnet, which would hardly be possible at all. One who has watched the installation of a dynamo, knowing that there is nowhere near any ordinary source of electricity, and has seen its armature begin to whirl and hum, and then in a few moments the violet sparklings of the brushes and the evident presence of a powerful current of electricity, is almost justified in the common opinion that the genius of man has devised a machine to create something out of nothing. ”

“ That which was utterly unknown to the most splendid civilizations of the past is in our time the chief power of civilization, daily engaged in making that history of a new era that is yet to be written in words. It has been demonstrated long since that men's lives are to be influenced not by theory, or belief, or argument and reason, so much as by that course of daily life which is not attempted to be governed by argument and reason, but by great physical facts like steam, electricity and machinery in their present applications. ”

“ It was known, to journalism especially, that the cable would never be laid and that the enterprise was absurd. But it was like the laying of the first land line. There was a way to do it, existing in the brains and faith of men, though at first that way was not known. From this third meeting the two ships again sailed away, the Niagara for America, the Agamemnon for Valencia Bay. This time the wire did not part, and on August 29th, 1858, the old world and the new were bound together for the first time, and each could read almost the thoughts of the other. ”

“ The steel-mill is, indeed, the most colossal combination of Steam and Steel. There are tireless arms, moved by steam, insensible alike to monstrous strains and white heat, which seize the vast ingots and carry them to and fro, handling with incredible celerity the masses that were unknown to man before the invention of the Bessemer process. ”

“ Applied to transportation, locomotion alone, its effects have been revolutionary. Applied to common life in its minute ramifications these effects could not have been believed or foretold, and are incredible. The thought might be followed indefinitely, and it is almost impossible to compare the world as we know it with the world of our immediate ancestors. Only by means of contrasts, startling in their details, can we arrive at an adequate estimate, even as a moral farce, of the power of steam as embodied in the modern engine in a thousand forms. ”

“ The steam-engine has given a new impetus to industry, and in a sense an added meaning to life. It has made possible most that was ever dreamed of material greatness. It has altered the destiny of this nation, and other nations, made greatness out of crude beginnings, wealth out of poverty, prosperity upon thousands of square miles of uninhabitable wilderness. It was the chiefest instrumentality in the widening of civilization, the bringing together of alien peoples, the dissemination of ideas. Electricity may carry the idea; steam carries the man with the idea. ”

“ 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 demonstrations of electricity are startling chiefly for three reasons: newness, silence, and inconceivable rapidity of action. Let one hold a wire in one's hand six or eight inches from the end, and then insert that end into the flame of a gas-jet. It is as old as human experience that that part of the wire which is not in the flame finally grows hot, and burns one's fingers. A change has taken place in the molecules of the wire that is not visible, is noiseless, and that has traveled along the wire. It excites neither wonder nor remark. No one asks the reason why. ”

“ Monstrous throats gasp for a draught of white-hot metal and take it at a gulp. Glowing masses are trundled to and fro. There are mountains of ore, disappearing in a night, and ever renewed. There is a railway system, and the huge masses are conveyed from place to place by locomotive engines. ”

“ Out of the thought that is born of things has already arisen a new conception of the universe, and of the Eternal Mind who is its master. Among these things, these daily manifestations of a seeming mystery, the most splendid are the phenomena of electricity. They court the human understanding and offer a continual challenge to that faculty which alone distinguishes humanity from the beasts. ”

“ Nevertheless, from the earliest moment in which it became known that electricity was akin to heat--that an interruption of the easy passage of a current produced heat--the minds of men were busy with the question of how to turn the tremendous fact to everyday use. Progress was slow, and part of it was accidental. The great servant of modern mankind was first an untrained one. It was a marked advance when the gaslights in a theater could be all lighted at once by means of batteries and the spark of an induction coil. ”

“ Fiske, is also the author of ingenious electrical appliances for the working of those immense gun-carriages that have grown too big for men to move, and for the hoisting into their cavernous breeches of shot and shell. The men who work these guns now do not need to see the enemy, even through the porthole or the embrasure. They can attend strictly to the business of loading and firing, assisted by machines nearly or quite automatic, and can cant and lay the piece by an index, and fire with an electric lanyard. The genius of science has taken the throne vacated by the goddess of glory. ”

“ Thus Franklin came into the field. He was an investigator who brought to his aid a singular capacity possessed by the very few; the capacity for an unbiased looking for the hidden reasons of things. There was no field too sacred or too old for his prying investigations and his private conclusions. He was, as much as any man ever is, an original thinker. He knew of all the electrical experiments of others, and they produced in his mind conclusions distinctly his own. ”

“ The human voice, recognizable, in articulate words, is apparently borne for miles, now even for some hundreds of miles, upon an attenuated wire which hangs silent in the air carrying absolutely nothing more than thousands of little varying impulses of electricity. Not a word that is spoken at one end of it is ever heard at the other, and the conclusion inevitable to the reason of even twenty years ago would be that if one person does not actually hear the other talk there is a miracle. ”

“ In conveying electricity upon a wire we have a little leak wherever we allow any other conductor to come too near, or to touch, the wire carrying the current. These little electrical leaks constantly exist. All nature is in a conspiracy to take it wherever it can find it, and from everything which at the moment has more than some other has, or more than its share with reference to the air and the world, of the mysterious essence that is in varying quantities everywhere. Glass is the usual non-conductor in daily use. A glance at the telegraph poles will explain all that has just been said. ”

“ Steam is gross, material, understandable, noisy. Its action is entirely comprehensible. The explosives, gunpowder, begriming the nations in all the wars since 1350, nitroglycerine, oxygen and hydrogen in all the forms of their combination, seem to be gross and material, the natural, though ferocious, servants of mankind. But electricity floats ethereal, apart, a subtle essence, shining in the changing splendors of the aurora yet existent in the very paper upon which one writes ”

“ He demonstrated that any body which has electricity gives it to any other body that has at the moment less. Before he had actually tried that celebrated experiment which is alone sufficient to give him place among the immortals, he had declared the theory upon which he made it to be true, and by reasoning, in an age that but dimly understood the force and conditions of inductive reason, had proved that lightning is but an electric spark. ”

“ It is now easy to learn that a coal-mine may be a more valuable possession than a gold-mine, and that iron is better as an industry than silver. There are mountains of iron in Mexico, but no coal, and silver-mines so rich that silver, smelted with expensive wood fuel, is the staple product of the country. Yet the people are among the poorest in Christendom. There is a ceaseless iron-famine, so that the chiefest form of railway robbery is the stealing of the links and pins from trains. There are almost no metal industries. ”

“ The big black guns are no longer run backward amid shouts and flying splinters, and rammed by men stripped to the waist and shrouded in the smoke of the last discharge, but swing their long and tapering muzzles to and fro out of steel casemates, and tilt their ponderous breeches like huge grotesque animals lying down. ”

“ But, instantly, at a touch a hundred miles away that forms a contact, there is a continuous "circuit;" the core becomes a magnet, and the piece of iron near it is drawn suddenly to it. Remove the distant finger from the button, the contact is broken, and the piece of iron immediately falls away again. It is the wonder of the production of instant movement at any distance, without any movement of any connecting part. It is a mysterious and incredible transmission of force not included among human possibilities forty years ago. ”

“ There is always enmity against an improver. In reality, the question of how much money Morse should make by inventing the electric telegraph was the question of least importance. Yet it was regarded as the only one. He is dead. His profits have gone into the mass, his honors have become international. The patents have long expired. The public, the entire world, are long since the beneficiaries, and the benefits continue to be inconceivably vast. Nothing in all history exceeds in moral importance the invention of the telegraph except the invention of printing with movable types. ”