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 WHY PROGRESS IS BY LEAPS 
 
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 GEORGE ' ILES 
 
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 REPRINTED FROM APPLETONS^ POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 
 
 FOR JUNE, 1896 
 
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Reprinted from Appletons' Popuhif Science Monthly 
 for June, 1896. 
 
 WHY PROGRESS IS BY LEAPS. 
 
 By GEORGE ILES. 
 
 AS master of electricity man is crowned the king of Nature. 
 - .A 1)rief glance at what electricity has done and promises to 
 do may have interest in itself; it may have yet more in disclos- 
 ing the law by which art and science march onward with ever- 
 hastened i)a('e, how it comes about that the history of m(^dern 
 progress is little else than a story of revolution. We shall see 
 that the subjugation of electricity means for thought and work 
 not an addition merely, but a multiplier. It marries the resources 
 of the mechanic, the engineer, the chemist, the artist, with issue 
 attested by all its own fertility, while it annexes province after 
 province unimagined before its advent. Because the latest up- 
 wai'd stride in knowledge and faculty has fallen to the lot of the 
 electrician, he has broadened the scientific horizon vastly more 
 than any earlier explorer; beyond any predecessor he has found 
 more in the field wherewith to prove the fecundity that infallibly 
 stamps every supremely great agent of discovery. As we trace a 
 few of the unending interlacements of electrical science and art 
 with other sciences and arts, we shall be reminded of a series of 
 permutations where the newest of the factors, because newest, 
 multiplies all the factors that went before by an unexampled 
 leap.* We shall find reason to believe that this is not merely 
 probable, but really is as a tendency true, and not alone of the 
 ga,ins which follow in the train of conquered electricity, but also 
 with regard to every other signal victory which has brought man 
 
 * Permutations of two elements, 1 and 2, are (1x2) two : 1,2; 2, 1 ; or a, f> ; b, a. 
 Of three elements the permutations are (1 x 2 x 3) six : 1, 2, 3 ; 1, 3, 2 ; 2, 1, 3 ; 2, 3, 1 ; 
 8, 1, 2 ; 3, 2, 1 ; or a, b, c ; a, r, 6 ; 6, a, c ,• 6, c, a; c, a, b ; e, A, a. Of four elements the 
 permutations are (1 x2x3x4) twenty-four ; of five elements, one hundred and twenty, and 
 so on. A new element or permutator multiplies by an increasing figure all the permutations 
 it finds. 
 
 COPTKIGHT, 1806, BT D. APPI.KTON AND ColfPANT. 
 
a WHY PROGRESS IS BY LEAPS. 
 
 to liis present pinnacle of power and insight. If in former ad- 
 vances this perniutative princii)le has been undetected, it stands 
 forth in clearest relief in that latest and therefore utmost stride 
 of skill and interjn'etation ushered in by Franklin, Volta, and 
 Faraday. And we shall presently note that this pernnifative 
 tendency oilers a key to some i)uzzling chapters in the biography 
 of the creatures which man has far outstrij)ped in the race of life, 
 and may also shed a needed ray on the story of the planet where 
 they and he have together struggled and vanquished or suc- 
 cumbed. If all this may be maintained, a permutative tendency 
 can perhaps be siiggested with res])ect to evolution in general as 
 color.ibly as with regard to development in particular realms. Is 
 this a large claim ? To the evidence, then : 
 
 By way of preface, let us for a moment consider the achieve- 
 ment most worthy to be compared with the conquest of electricity, 
 and, indeed, its necessary precursor. 
 
 When man first kindled fire, he rose to a new primacy among 
 created beings. Long before that fateful day he must have no- 
 ticed how the blaze of a tree riven by lightning could bring roots 
 and herbs to refreshing palatability, or, as a far volcano welled 
 forth its lava, how welcome the radiance in wintry air. What, he 
 may have thought, if I can summon fire at my bidding instead of 
 waiting upon heaven to let it fall or earth to belch it forth ? How 
 the wish came to fulfillment has been the subject of many an in- 
 genious guess. The likeliest of them imagines tliat in striking a 
 bit of quartz against a flint to point an arrow, a spark fell on dry 
 tinder, and that what at first was accident was soon repeated by 
 design. No ])iecemeal acquisition this, like learning to hit a 
 mark with stone or bolt. The man barelv able to light a fire was 
 enormously advantaged as comjjared with his fellow, however 
 dexterous, who just fell short of this skill. At once the fire- 
 maker took a bound forward that decisively withdrew him from 
 his next of kin. It was as if the globe had ex])anded itself be- 
 neath his tread ; for now, no longer chained by the sunbeam, all 
 the frozen noi'th was added to his liunting ground. The burning 
 brand cleared his path through tlie forest or shaped from a tree 
 trunk his rude canoe. It lifted the dreary pall of night. His 
 hearth, hea[)ed with boughs, cheered with light as well as warmth, 
 and became the family rallying place and altar. Baneful roots 
 buried in its embers lost their poison and furnislied a toothsome 
 meal, while food of many kinds when roasted or seethed was im- 
 proved in flavor and could be longer stored to abridge the seesaw 
 between plenty and want. As the cook daubed clay on her roast- 
 , ing tray of twigs that it might the better withstand flame, she 
 soon learned that clay by itself was a capital material for oven, 
 pot, or liettle, and S^ivres and Worcester, with all their varied art, 
 
WHY PB 00 BESS IS BY LEAPS. % 
 
 here took their rise. As primitive fisherman and hunter, man 
 employed fire to lure his prey, to affright the beasts to which he 
 himself was prey, or to yield protecting smoke against insect pests 
 scarcely less to be dreaded. In later ages as mariner he erected 
 on storm-beaten coasts beacons whose carefully tended blaze gave 
 warning or comfort to drifting voyagers, the flickering ray fore- 
 telling the sunlike beam of Sandy Hook or Skerryvore. As war- 
 rior he crowned the hills with similar flares to voice alarm to 
 scattered allies, prefiguring every modern telegraph. Again, as 
 warrior, having profited by the hardness fire conferred upon his 
 wooden spear, he was to receive gifts yet greater. Where, as on 
 the shores of Lake Superior, native copper almost pure lay upon 
 the ground, it was laboriously pounded into the primitive knife 
 or hammer. With fire his servant, the savage was independent 
 of such rare finds. Wherever he came upon an earthy mass, glit- 
 tering with however small a fraction of metal, he had but to 
 bring the ore to his hearth to free copper or iron from its bond- 
 age. There and then the art of the founder began to take the 
 place of the drudgery of the smith — a supersedure characteristic 
 enough and one of an uncounted series where good has had to 
 make way for better, where the worker and the fighter himself 
 has been overcome by stronger thews and keener wits. No tri- 
 umph of miner or chemist, of engineer on land or sea, that does 
 not date from the memorable hour when a savage just a little 
 cleverer than his fellows kindled for himself a blaze. Plainly, 
 then, fire came among the resources of man as a permutator of 
 exalted power. It gave an impulse to food-getting, to tool and 
 weapon making, to building, to migration, to every art that 
 cheered and adorned the home. It was an influence as pregnant 
 as any that has made man human and brought the empire of 
 Nature to his feet. 
 
 Through the course of all the ages since, almost down to our 
 own day, flame had beside her a twin force all unrecognized. 
 Elusive as a wood nymph she glinted as lightning, or as the 
 aurora streamed fitfully across the sky. Anon she condescended 
 to the amber of the sea beach, which under gentle friction drew 
 to itself fragments of fallen leaves, of withered straw. In yet 
 other guise she defied the downward tendency of unsupported 
 masses, and, as the legend tells us, sorely puzzled a she])herd in 
 bidding his crook cling fast to the ceiling of a cave roofed, as we 
 would say now, with magnetic ore. At a later day the magnet 
 became something more than an empty marvel, and as the com- 
 pass assumed the office of guiding sun and star when these were 
 hidden. Little wonder that so various a masquerade was long 
 impenetrable, that Franklin less than five generations ago should 
 detect that lightning and electricity are one, and that only in our 
 
4 WJJV PROGRESS IS BY LEAPS. 
 
 day at the hands of Hertz has it been demonstrated that the elec- 
 tric pulse differs only from the wave of heat or light in being 
 longer. This discovery of Hertz was long ago foreshadowed in 
 the observation that heat can have electric origin. One of the 
 first fruits of electrical study was the finding that some metals 
 transmit electricity better than others, and that the efficacy of a 
 conductor depends in part on its size. When a conducting wire 
 was reduced to extreme tenuity, the resistance to the current's 
 passage, with striking resemblance to common friction, expressed 
 itself as vivid heat. The miner and the gunner at once saw their 
 opportunity to use electricity to toTich off their f\iscs and to ex- 
 plode at the same instant, with an effect before impossible, a I'ound 
 of separate charges. 
 
 Copying the methods of the miner, the mechanic and the 
 chemist very often find electric heat the most advantageous they 
 can employ. When the broken blade of a propeller is to be re- 
 paired, the electric welder can be taken to its work instead of the 
 work having to go to a stationai'y welder. When electric heat is 
 carried into a crucible through almost impenetrable walls of gy])- 
 sum, it enters the very heart of its task without the offense and 
 waste of fiame. Thus to-day is flame face to face with a sup- 
 planter in the shape of its long undetected twin. Until this gen- 
 eration (lanie alone was the source not only of heat, but of the 
 beam of candle, lamp, and gas jet. Today myriads of electric 
 bulbs are aglow without flame — indeed, just because combustion is 
 rendered impossible by the rigid exclusi(m of air. As these in- 
 candescent lamps were long ago ))rophesied in the miner's electric 
 fuse, so also has the fii'st simple process of the electroplater led 
 up to an art incomparably more important. To-day not surfaces 
 merely, but large masses, chiefly oi statuary, are built in cool 
 tanks by electricity. Let the current become cheaper still, and 
 the founder may find the remainder of his business tiansferred to 
 this formidable rival, the warping heats of sand molds banished, 
 the scorching temperature of crucible and ladle a reminiscence. 
 The same fate may be in store for the smelting furnace. Already 
 vast quantities of cop})er are refined electrolytically, and an au- 
 spicious beginning has been made in using electricity for the whole 
 process of parting mi'tal from ore. Thus methods which com- 
 menced in dismissing fiame end boldly by eliminating heat itself. 
 This usurping electricity, it may be said, usually finds its source, 
 after all, in fire under a steam boiler. True, but mark the harness- 
 ing of Niagara, of the Lachine Rapids near Montreal, of a thou- 
 sand streams elsewhere. In the years of the near future motive 
 power of Nature's giving is to be wasted less and less, and per- 
 force will more and more exclude heat from the chain of trans- 
 formations which issue in the locomotive's flight, in the whirl of 
 
WHV PROGRESS IS BY LEAPS. $ 
 
 factory and mill ; and thus in some degree is allayed the fear, 
 never well grounded, that when the coal fields of the world are 
 spent, civilization must collapse. As the electrician hears this 
 foreboding, he recalls how much fuel is wasted in converting heat 
 into electricity. He looks beyond either turbine or shaft turned 
 by wind or tide, and, remembering tbat the zinc dissolved in his 
 battery yields at his will its full content of energy, either as heat 
 or electricity, lie asks. Why may not coal and forest tree, which 
 are but other kinds of fuel, be made to do the same ? 
 
 In another field let us observe electricity as a factor of fruit- 
 fulness quite as singular. It was at first tlie chemist who eman- 
 cipated electricity for new and myriad uses. His successor to-day 
 is the engineer, who wins his spurs by bringing his generator to 
 practical perfection, by improving his steam and gas engines to 
 double their efficiency of thirty years ago. If to the engijieer and 
 mechanic the electric art owes much, magnificently lias tlie debt 
 been repaid. As we discover in replacing at our street door an 
 old-fashioned moving boll pull by an electric wire armed with a 
 })ush button, electricity transmits motion without movement of 
 its conductor as a mass. Availing himself of this golden property, 
 the machinist removes from his shop a labyrinth of wheels and 
 belts and puts in their stead a few wires at rest, each in charge 
 of the motor actuating a machine. Manifold gains result. The 
 power needed to whirl these wheels and belts is saved, and when 
 but one or two machines of a large number are to be set in motion 
 the economy rises to a high figure, while the workshop is lighter, 
 cleaner, more wliolesome in every way. Since electricity is of all 
 phases of energy the easiest to preserve from losses resembling 
 leakage or friction, the current can not only be distributed 
 throughon the largest workshop with convenience and economy, 
 it can be sent to the shop from an engine or a water wheel many 
 miles away, as in connecting motors at Buffalo to dynamos at 
 Niagara, twenty-seven miles distant. With the transmission of 
 electricity for distances vastly exceeding twenty-seven miles we 
 have long been ^amiliar in the telegraph. It is by improving the 
 coverings which prevent the current escaping from its wire, by 
 taking advantage of the fact that a wire can almost as well carry 
 a current of high tension as of low, and, above all, by increasing 
 the quantity of the current so as to make the enterprise worth 
 while, that the telegraphy of power has followed upon the teleg- 
 raphy of mere signals. 
 
 In the telegraph at work over long distances a remarkable 
 peculiarity of electricity displays itself. In days of yore, when 
 letters were intrusted to a chain of messengers, each of whom bore 
 the pouch for a stage of its journey, a carrier might come to the 
 end of his trip utterly fagged out; but if he had barely the 
 
6 WHY PROGRESS IS BY LEAPS. 
 
 strength to pass liiH burden to the next man it was enough. 
 Mucli the same is tlio system of relays wljen a telegram takes its 
 way from New York to Tacoma. First it goes to Buffalo, where 
 the current, faint after its run of four hundred an<l forty miles, 
 touches off a second ])()Worful current born in Buffalo. This in 
 its turn boars the dispatch to Chicago. There a third current is 
 Impressed into service, and so on, until at the end of a succession 
 of transfers the words are clicked out in Tacoma. This whole 
 process is committed to self-acting repeaters that do their work in 
 the fraction of a second. It is in i)ulling triggers in such fashion 
 as this, in liberating forces indefinitely greater than the initial 
 impulse, that electricity brings to muscles of brass and steel some- 
 thing very like a nervous system, so that the merest touch directs 
 the course of a steamship through the tempest- tossed Atlantic. 
 Engineer, workman, and artist can thus reserve their strength for 
 tasks more profitable than muscular dead lift and find their sweep 
 of initiation and control broadened to the utmost bound. In the 
 field of war, for instance, a torpedo can be launched, propelled, 
 steered, and exploded by a telegraph key a mile or two away ; the 
 constructor may, indeed, confidently give all his orders in advance 
 and build a torpedo which will fulfill a fate of both murder and 
 suicide predestined in its cams and magnets. Or a camera, under 
 the control of an operator at the safe end of a wire, is sent soar- 
 ing in a balloon car above an enemy's camp, effectively playing 
 the spy. 
 
 Another apparatus electric and photographic, happily less un- 
 common, is employed for observatory rLi;ords which, as near Are- 
 quipa, in Peru, without supervision keeps itself busy for a fort- 
 night together. Still more remarkable is Mr. Muybridge's round 
 of cameras, timed as only electricity can time them, which seize 
 practically instantaneous views of figures in rapid motion, as 
 horses trotting. In Mr. Edison's kinetoscope photographs made 
 at each forty-sixth of a second follow one another so quickly 
 under an eyepiece as to fuse with the effect of life and action. 
 Pictures of birds thus caught on the wing may prove seed corn 
 for harvests to be reaped by the experimenter in mechanical 
 flight — an achievement which, strange to say, attracts the interest 
 of military rather than business men. In the service of war and 
 peace one would suppose the ordinary telegraph to be speedy 
 enough. Not so, thinks the inventor. In the latest process a dis- 
 patch wings its way from New York to Chicago at the rate of 
 one thousand words a minute, to Philadelphia thrice as fast. The 
 telegram is taken first to a machine which symbolizes each letter 
 as perforations on a strip of paper ; then the strip is run between 
 metallic springs of exquisite delicacy. At each perforation the 
 springs touch and the current takes its way through the wire. 
 
WHY PROGRESS IS BY LEAPS. 7 
 
 At tlie receiving station the delay involved in the arousal and 
 action of electro-magnets is abolished. The current instant by in- 
 stant writes its message on a moving ribbon of paper sensitized so 
 as to change color under an electric flow. This instance is typical 
 of what ingenuity can do when electricity is added to its armory. 
 A task is divided between an o|)erator and an autonuitic nuichine 
 in such wise that intelligence is allotted only that part for whicli 
 intelligence is required, while for the remaining part the utmost 
 speed of electrical and chemical action is invoked — a pace which 
 in this particular case sixty fold outstrips the most dexterous 
 manipulation. 
 
 Another means by which inventors have expedited telegraphy 
 has been by transjnitting several messages simultaneously over a 
 single wire. Of these multiplex systems certain are synchronous 
 in principle and seem to have suggested to Prof. Elisha Gray his 
 telautograph, an instrument that imitates exactly the motion of a 
 pencil, in say Boston, by the motion of another, in say Baltimore, 
 reproducing with ecpial facility either handwriting or outline 
 drawing. To understand the ])rinciple involved, let us glance at 
 an everyday application of electricity in keeping scores of clock 
 pendulums, no matter how far apart, in perfect step. If two ])en- 
 dulums at right angles to each other are attached to a moving 
 pencil their motions may bo communicated to a distance by two 
 currents which actuate two pendulums in control of a second and 
 copying pencil. The electric clock at which we have just been 
 looking can, if we please, be sealed in a glazed box, secure from 
 dust and dampness. Here opens a fresh path to the inventor who 
 wishes to avoid the resistance or leakage entailed when a rod 
 moves through a slot or a stufling box. It is often of cardinal 
 importance that a bit of metal at rest shoiild throb with a jmlse 
 strong enough to do severe drudgery or tell a tale which other- 
 wise would go untold. If an engineer wishes to know how much 
 heat wastes itself through the walls of a steam cylinder, his ques- 
 tion is answered through a motionless wire attached to a delicate 
 metallic thermometer buried in the cylinder's mass. In experi- 
 menting with new alloys the same method informs the chemist of 
 changes of temperature at the core of his crucible, changes often 
 abrupt and transient and at times denoting qualities he seeks to 
 detain or reproduce. In a very different domain of exploration 
 the engineer uses the telephone to expose perilous defects in metal 
 beams. 
 
 As we prove when we unhook a telephone, or lift an incan- 
 descent lamp, electricity readily traverses a flexible wire: this un- 
 bars a fresh resource to invention. To-day rock drills, coal cut- 
 ters, and deck planers are designed in forms which combine motor 
 and tool ; so much is thereby gained in adaptability that a re- 
 
8 WHY PROGRESS IS BY LEAPS. 
 
 modeling is in progress of much light machinery in its first estate 
 rigidly limited in play by shafts, belts, or gearing. Dentistry 
 and other arts of refined manipulation are indebted for novel 
 facilities to the flexible mechanical shaft — a tightly wound coil of 
 steel wire. This device is in turn being shown to the door by the 
 new partnership between an electric thread and a tool. And the 
 wire, however slender, which binds a reservoir of power to its 
 work, can on occasion be discarded, as in the rolling contact of 
 the electric trolley wheel. And even contact can be dispensed 
 with if strict economy is not imperative. We are Tamiliar with 
 the annoyance, due to induction, of being obliged in atolei)lione 
 circuit to overhear other subscribers, whose wires are often far 
 distant from our own. A hint in this for the engineer at the 
 head of the British telegraphs, Mr. Preece. Utilizing induction, 
 he has established a telegraph between Oban and Auchnacraig, 
 divided b}' six miles of sea, using wires strung along the opt)osite 
 shores. 
 
 Electricity, light, heat, and chemical action are all in essence 
 motion ; electricity is the most desirable of them all, because it 
 can most readily and fully become the source or issue of any 
 other. The i)re-eniinent sensitiveness of electrical apparatus 
 makes it a surpassing means of measuring minute portions of 
 space or time, of light, heat, chemical activity, or mechanical 
 motiim. Hence a brood of telltales of widely contrasted pur- 
 pose. Selenium, a metalloid of the same lineage as sulphui-, and 
 betraying its descent by a striking family resemblance, has the 
 cui'ious property of transmitting electricity more freely in light 
 than in darkness ; a stick of selenium, therefore, is the pivot of a 
 device +o give warning when extinction befalls a lamp charged 
 with iuiportant duty. In thermometers a circuit broken or com- 
 pleted acts as a fire signal, or, on shi[)board, heralds the ap- 
 proach of an iceberg. Electric fingers sound a gong when the 
 water recedes below the safety level in a steam boiler, or report 
 an attempted breach of bolt or bar by the burglar's jimmy. 
 Each of these warnings can be registered at a distance, so that in 
 case of neglect by an attendant there can be no disputing the fact. 
 Now, if an electric alarm can summon a servant to duty, why may 
 not the inventor go further, and so .add to his device that it shall 
 of its own motion do what needs to be done ? Accordingly, we 
 find furnaces fitted up with electrical control, so that the draft is 
 opened or fuel added when the temperature falls too low, or the 
 reverse, when the flame is too fierce ; when the fuel is gas this 
 stoking leaves nothing to be desired. New mechanism of this 
 kind is constantly being contrived. The inventor who began by 
 conferring electric nerves on muscles of brass and iron has, 
 thanks to electricity, gone the length of combining his wires and 
 
WHY PROGRESS IS BY LEAPS. 9 
 
 magnets into something very like a conscious and responsive 
 brain : his intelligence culminates in duplicating itself. 
 
 Prodigal as electricity is of gifts to the mechanic and engineer, 
 it as generously multiplies the resources of their friend and part- 
 ner, the chemist. Electricity, we must not forget, was presented 
 to the world as a stream of tolerably even flow, by a process of 
 chemical undoing, in Volta's crown of cups. If chemical taking 
 apart can yield a current, a current can in turn be used to build, 
 as every piece of plating proves. Yet to construct a battery in 
 which both processes shall alternate, without undue weight or 
 waste of material, is a task as yet not satisfactorily accomplished, 
 despite constant and ingenious attack. A thoroughly good and 
 simple storage battery would mean nearly as much for electric 
 art as the dynamo. From a dynamo it would receive currents de- 
 rived from wind or water powers, or from engines temporarily 
 laden below their capacity, and use these currents to restore a 
 metal from its solution by a process exactly that of electroplat- 
 ing. Then, on demand, it would yield electricity once more by 
 surrendering this metal to solution, as a common voltaic battery 
 does. If the chemist has thus far l)et'n somewhat balHed by the 
 problems of the storage battery, he has had better fortune in 
 other fields of endeavor. Electricity joined to heat hands him a 
 two-edged sword of irresistible cleaving power. Compounds, 
 such as those of chromium, of peculiar refractoriness, are readily 
 parted in the electric furnace of Moissan, and elements once ex- 
 tremely rare are now marketed in quantity at prices steadily fall- 
 ing. A generation ago aluminum was so scarce and dear that it 
 was formed into jewelry ; to-day the metal has been so cheapened 
 by electricity that it finds a renidy sale as kitchen ware. Minute 
 diamonds and rubies of electric manufacture are now competing 
 with the product of the mine, and materials used on a gigantic 
 scale in the arts — caustic soda, bleaching powder, and the like — are 
 produced at less cost than ever by electrical agency. The chemist, 
 when he chooses, can beat his electrical sword into a trowel, and 
 build compounds which seem prophetic of the day when the slow 
 elaborations of the farm and orchard shall make way for the arti- 
 ficial synthesis of sugars, oils, and starch. 
 
 Greater than all the wealth created by electricity in workshop 
 or laboratory are its aids to pure research. The chief physical 
 generalization of our time, the persistence of force, came into 
 view only when electricity was recognized as a phase of energy, 
 only when electrical means of measurement had become trust- 
 worthy. It is because men of absolutely disinterested spirit, like 
 Faraday and Henry, devoted themselves to ascertaining the laws 
 of electricity that we have to-day the telegraph, the telephone, and 
 the electric furnace. " Before there can be applied science there 
 
lo WHY PROGRESS IS BY LEAPS. 
 
 must be science to apply," and it is in enabling the investigator 
 to know Nature under a fresh aspect that electricity rises to its 
 highest office. As a case in point, take the bolometer of Prof. S. 
 P. Langley : its delicate wire, sensitive to one millionth of a de- 
 gree centigrade, is moved by minute steps through the invisible 
 areas of the solar spectrum ; each indication of temperature, 
 automatically photographed, comes out in a series of dark and 
 bright lines. This process, repeated with each chemical element, 
 promises that one day the physicist will have before him a full 
 or tolerably complete map of every distinctive spectrum. He 
 can then ask, Given such and such vibrations, how is the body 
 constituted that sent them forth ? — much as a musician might try 
 to reason from the tone and timbre of a note to the structure of 
 the instrument which uttered the note. In further uses of pho- 
 tography the physicist, by means of instantaneous contacts, is 
 beginning to find out what goes on in the critical moments when 
 chemical collisions in the voltaic cell are gliding into electric 
 waves — an inquiry which bears on the prime question of electric 
 art, namely, how the chemical energy conttVTiod_iri cop! can be 
 transformed into a current without the enormous levies imposed 
 by the steam engine. Hertz, in the purely scientific excursion by 
 which he generated electric waves intermediate in length be- 
 tween those of sound and light, came upon a discovery of pro- 
 found interest — that, given its appropriate ray, every substance 
 whatever offers it a free and open path. It remained for Prof. 
 Rontgen to complete the proof that certain of these rays, while 
 refusing obedience to the laws of light, can, nevertheless, exert 
 photographic power. His apparatus combines in the happiest way 
 the utmost resources of both the electrician and the photogra- 
 pher ; at a vital point it employs the singular capacity for fluores- 
 cence whereby the compounds of barium and other substances 
 can convert to visibility an otherwise invisible image. Apart 
 from such a triumph as this, rich in possibilities for art and 
 science, the common routine of ascertaining electrical constants 
 has high value in research ; to know the conductivity, polariza- 
 bility, and other electrical properties of matter is to jjeer at its 
 architecture through new windows ; to detect many of the links 
 which bind atom to atom, molecule to molecule. A new orches- 
 tration of inquiry is possible through the instruments created by 
 the electrician, through the advances in method which these 
 instruments suggest. Hence to-day a surround is in progress 
 which may early in the twentieth century make atom and 
 molecule as obedient to the chemist as brick and stone are to the 
 builder now. 
 
 But, however much new knowledge may do with electricity, 
 some of its best work is already done. It is not likely in the f u- 
 
WHY PROGRESS IS BY LEAPS. it 
 
 ture to perform a greater feat than placing all mankind within 
 earshot of each other. Were electricity unmastered, there could 
 he no democratic government of the United States. To-day the 
 drama of national affairs is more directly in the view of every 
 American citizen than a century ago the public business of Dela- 
 ware could be to the men of that little State. Railroads, with all 
 they mean for civilization, could not have been born without the 
 telegraph ; and railroads and telegraphs are the sinews and 
 nerves of national life, the prime agencies in welding together 
 the diverse and widely separated States and Territories of the 
 Union. A Boston merchant builds a cotton mill in Georgia ; an 
 Illinois manufacturer establishes an agency in Seattle ; the tele- 
 graph, which informs them day by day how their investments 
 prosper, tells idle men where they can find work, where work 
 can seek idle men. Chicago is laid in ashes, Charleston topples 
 in earthquake, Johnstown is whelmed in flood, and instantlj'' a 
 continent rises to their relief. And benefits denied to charity 
 issue in the strictly commercial services of the telegraph. Its 
 click has exorcised the fiend of f amino from every quarter of the 
 civilized globe ; for, with its finger on the throttle-valves of loco- 
 motive and steamship, no longer does food rot here when thou- 
 sands lack bread there ; the markets of the world are merged, and 
 that one great market reaches every man's door. 
 
 In a less conspicuous way electricity works equal good. Its 
 motor, freeing us from the horse's deliberate pace, is spreading 
 out our towns and cities into their adjoining country; field and 
 garden compete with naiTow streets ; the sunny cottage is in 
 rivalry with the odious tenement house. Electric lines, at first 
 suburban, are now fast linking town to town and city to ci'y, 
 while as auxiliaries to steam railroiids they place sparsely settled 
 districts in the arterial current of the world. Great as are the 
 blessings which electricity brings to country folk, it stands ready 
 to bestow yet more in the hives of population. Until a few dec- 
 ades ago the water supply of cities was drawn in part from wells 
 here and there, from lines of piping laid in favored areas, and al- 
 ways insufficient. To-day a supply such as that of New York is 
 abundant and cheap because it enters every house. Let a single 
 electrical service enjoy a like privilege, and it can offer a current 
 which is heat, light, chemical energy, or motive power at a wage 
 lower than that of any other servant. Unwittingly, then, the 
 electrical engineer is a political reformer of high degree. All 
 that he asks is that this municipal electricity shall be under con- 
 trol at once competent and honest. Let us hope that his plea, 
 joined to others as weighty, may quicken the spirit of civic right- 
 eousness so that some of the richest fruits ever borne in the gar- 
 den of art and science may not be proffered in vain. 
 
la WHY PROGRESS IS BY LEAPS. 
 
 This rapid survey of what electricity has done and yet may 
 do has shown it the creator of a thousand material resources: 
 the corner stone of ])hysical generalization ; a stimulus to the 
 moral sense, by making what otlierwise were an empty wish 
 rise to sympathy fulfilled ; wh.ile, in more closely binding up the 
 good of the bee with the welfare of the hive, it is an educator 
 and confirmer of every social bond. Are we not, then, justified 
 in holding electricity to be a multiplier of faculty and insight, 
 a means of dignifying mind r.nd soui, unexnrapled yince man first 
 kindled fire rnd rejoiced ? 
 
 And the i>(l\ances due to electricity have significance still 
 unexhausted. It was in 1800, on the threshold of the nineteenth 
 century, that Volta devised the first battej-y — the crown of cuj)s. 
 In less than a hundrc'd years the force then liberated has vitally 
 interwoven itself with every art and science, with fruitage not 
 to be imagined even by men of the stature of Watt, Lavoisier, 
 or Hunil)oldt, Compare this rapidity of conquest with tlie slow 
 adaptation, through age after age, of fire to cooking, snu^lting, 
 tempering. Yet it was ])artly because the use of fire liad drawn 
 out man's intelligence that he was ready so qxiickly to seize 
 upon electricity and subdue it. The principle of ])ermutation, 
 illustrated in both victories, interprets not only the vast exj)an- 
 sion of human empire won by a new weapon of ])rime power, it 
 explains also why these accessions are brought under rule with 
 ever-accelerated ])ace. Every new talent but clears the way for 
 the talents newer still which are born from it. 
 
 And a fresh mode of mastery entails other consequences well 
 worthy of remark. Suppose two contending armies face each 
 other, fairly matched, except that one has the telegi'aph and the 
 other has not. Which will win ? In less striking fashion, but 
 still decisively, must every factor of prime rank as it made its 
 appearance have told in the battles of early man. Let us turn 
 from discovery and invention to some consideration of the prin)i- 
 tive discoverer and inventor, and try to recall the ejjoch when his 
 inarticulate cries were becoming the rudiments of speech. Let 
 us imagine him a hunter returning to his fellows from a solitary 
 expedition. He tells that he saw a deer quench its thirst at a 
 brookside, but found the animal too fleet for his arrow ; how he 
 heard in the distance a bear's fierce growl, and fortunately came 
 upon a cave where he took refuge till the brute had i)assed. 
 Such a faculty of communication as this, even in its beginnings, 
 would give a tribe enjoying it an incalculable advantage over its 
 unspeaking kin. Speech makes the distant as if present in space, 
 makes the past as if present in time ; it is the first and most 
 signal step, therefore, by which man conquers both space and 
 time. No elephant or dog, however intelligent, has means to tell 
 
WHV PROGRESS IS BY LEAPS. ij 
 
 what lie saw here an hour ago, or what is to be fourid there 
 beyond the range of the eye. Because in early times speech thus 
 placed the experience of one man at the service of other men, 
 the possessors of this matchless power could, if they chose, exert 
 deadly rivalry against their mute next of kin, and either anni- 
 hilate them, or banish them to sterile wilds, or degrade them to 
 servitude. What is probable here is probable in other fields of 
 struggle, and we have a hint as to why connecting links in the 
 plexus of organic life are either very rare or wholly lacking. 
 The introduction of a radically new weapon, or tool, would so re- 
 double the strength of the creature able to grasp and wield it 
 that its war on competitors would end so soon as to leave scarcely 
 a relic on the field. 
 
 Speech led to another great achievement when it called to its 
 aid the carved or painted symbol, the word-picture, and at last 
 the alphabet. Then the recorder, the priest, the teacher, was no 
 longer a mere speaker who had to be present when he told his 
 story. Ages after his death, his annals, prophecies, parables, re- 
 mained to be read, to echo his voice — and this perhaps on shores 
 many leagues remote from the penman's home or grave. Knowl- 
 edge could now be accumulated as never before, for every man 
 could begin where the experience of his predecessors had left otf. 
 The culmination of this mighty art issues to-day in two wonderful 
 instruments — the phonograph, which bids the spoken word record 
 and repeat itself with all its characteristic tones ; the camera, 
 which instantly limns all the eye can see and more, which prints 
 much that the tongue and the pen must leave unsaid. In a mas- 
 terly discussion of the origin of languages and the antiquity of 
 speaking man, Mr. Horatio Hale concludes that the acquirement 
 of speech dates back but eight to ten thousand years. He credits 
 speech and writing with the sudden and wonderful flowering of 
 human genius which developed in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Phaniicia, 
 Northern India, and China a high and varied civilization, whose 
 memorials, in their works of art and literature, astonish us at this 
 day, and in some respects d fy imitation.* 
 
 To i)aint and to write implies a free and supple hand ; gesture, 
 upon which philologists are substantially agreed that primitive 
 speech largely depended, requires the like freedom of hand and 
 arm. Hence, before man could paint, or write, or even gesticu- 
 late, it was necessary that he should be erect. Man's assumption 
 of the upright attitude marks one of the supreme stages of his 
 progress. What have since become arms and hands, relieved 
 from tasks of locomotion, were able to come into contact with 
 
 * Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Buffalo, 
 1886, p. 315. 
 
i4 WHY PROGRESS IS BY LEAPS. 
 
 things and know them more fully and exactly than ever before. 
 The brain, informed and stimulated by its new harvest of impres- 
 sions, imagined fresh feats of skill and directed them. The rude 
 stone, lifted from the ground and used as a hammer, was gradually 
 shaped as an axe, a scraper, a chisel, an arrowhead. There lay 
 the germ of the ingenuity which blossoms to-day in the locomo- 
 tive and steamship, in the observatory camera which multiplies 
 the known universe a thousand times, which in the telephone 
 catches the echo of storms sweeping the solar disk. As with the 
 faculty of speech, so doubtless also when the hand began to handle 
 and to tell the brain what it could feel and do. A gain so preg- 
 nant as dexterity, even in its feeble inception, would come as an 
 irresistible wedge between the fighters and the workers who had 
 it and their fellows who missed it by however little. 
 
 The perniututive tendency which we are tracing has dug other 
 gulfs than those which part man and anthropoid. Let us glance 
 for a moment at creatures far beneath mankind in the scale of 
 being. Birds are clearly derived from reptiles, but how far apart 
 to-day are the bird and the rejjtile ! It was the power of flight, 
 with all that it involved in transforming every organ of the body, 
 in revolutionizing habit, that stood at the parting of the ways. 
 Even in its beginnings this power would promote escape from 
 enemies, the procuring food in places otherwise inaccessible. In 
 the process of natural selection here would be the faculty valu- 
 able beyond any other, and therefore first seized in its favoring 
 variations. Flight beyond any other capacity would thus be 
 developed and increased as one generation succeeded another, 
 until at last the flier could disregard its unwinged enemies, seek 
 food on steepest crag or farthest islet, and there lay its eggs and 
 nurse its brood with none to make it afraid. As far as the fossil 
 record has been pieced together, it anjply warrants this view of the 
 early history of the avian race. 
 
 Take passage now to a widely diff'erent realm and note the i)er- 
 mutative eft'ect wrought when insects supplant the winds at the 
 business of fertilizing flowers. Nectar secreted near the pollen of 
 a ])lant attracts flies and moths brushed by this pollen ; they sail 
 away to other flowers and tie a marriage knot with an cfl:"ective- 
 ness impossible to the aimless air. The consequence is that sim- 
 ply through such woolliness of vesture as enables them to catch 
 dust on their clothes, insects of narrowest intelligence are un- 
 knowingly the painters, scul])tors, and perfumers of unnumbered 
 varieties of blossoms. And indefinitely ])rior to either flower or 
 reptile was the day when the eartli, a fiery cloud, had come to the 
 critical point, in its gradual loss of heat, where atom stood almost 
 within the attractive range of atom, when the latent combinability 
 of matter we call chemical was ready to be born. Was not the 
 
WHY PROGRESS IS BY LEAPS. ij 
 
 releasing touch of cold a permutator of highest degree ? It made 
 every other possible, it forged the first link in the chain of forces, 
 vital, mental, moral, in the life of earth and man. 
 
 What is hero indicated in outline was suggested by the writer 
 in the Popular Science Monthly for June, 187G. He has since 
 gathered from men of mark in diverse walks of science data from 
 which inferences such as those here set forth may be deduced 
 in ample detail. These data he expects in due time to offer to 
 the public, together with consideration of the facts which mask 
 or qualify the permutative principle in evolution— a principle 
 which accounts for the leaps of progress, human and general, for 
 the accelerations of that progress, and for there being chapters 
 missing in its story. 
 
 • * * r . 
 
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