DAMAGE BOOK
168193
OSMANIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
Call No.
Author
Title ^ . * ,*i i
dud
This book should be returned (i>n or before the date'
last marked below.
Waldemar Kaempffert
SCIENCE TODAY AND
TOMORROW
NICHOLSON AND WATSON
For their kind permission to reprint some of the
material in these chapters the author wishes to express
his thanks to the editors of the Sunday magazine
^section of the New York Times, the Survey Graphic,
fche American Magazine, and the Forum.
COPYRIGHT 1940 BY IVOR NICHOLSON AND
WATSON, 7 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON E.C.4
PRINTED BY NORTHUMBERLAND PRESS LIMITED
GATESHEAD ON TYNE
Preface
THOUGH MEN OF SCIENCE USUALI^f SHUN 51'ECUJLATIUN,
they do not always refrain from indicating the poten-
tialities of their work. I have seized on their prophecies
and developed them in ways which, I hope, will not
be deemed too extravagant. Indeed, I have found it
necessary to temper some of their fantasies, this be-
cause an extensive acquaintance with the work of prac-
tical engineers has taught me what may and may not
be realized in a future not too remote. My excuse for
predicting as well as attempting to elucidate, lies in
the growing interest that the public displays in the
social implications of science. The task of a vulgarizer
of science is no longer confined to mere elementary
exposition of principles and procedures. He must in-
dicate, as best he can, what effects new discoveries and
inventions are likely to have on individual and com-
munity life. Indeed, a whole literature on what is
called 'the impact of science on society 5 has been pro-
duced within the last decade.
My indebtedness to the many distinguished physi-
cists, biologists, chemists, and engineers on whose
writings I have drawn is evident enough. Special ac-
knowledgement to them in this place seems unneces-
sary because it is made in the chapters themselves.
W.K.
NEW YORK, May 1939.
Contents
i A Star Explodes 9
ii The Sun: New Aspects 21
in Birth and Death of the Moon 39
iv Life in the Solar System 45
v Rocketing through Space 57
vi Explorers of the Atmosphere 79
vn The Mystery of the Atom 95
vni After Coal What? 107
ix The Chemical Revolution 123
x Can the Laboratory Create Life? 139
xi Evolution since Darwin 157
xii Carrel 169
xin Man and His World 183
xiv Jove's Competitors 195
xv Speed 207
xvi A Liner Leaves Port 219
xvn Electric Immortality 229
xvni Democracy and the Machine 243
/. A Star Explodes
SPEEDING ON ITS WAY TO THE EARTH AT THE RATE OF
186,000 miles a second, a ray of light tells us of a
stupendous catastrophe that occurred in the constella-
tion Hercules 1300 years ago. A star burst asunder.
While mailed knights were arming for one crusade
after another, while monarchies rose and fell, while
Scandinavian, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian navi-
gators were making their great voyages of discovery,
the light of that explosion was travelling towards us.
Now that it has arrived, science is in a better posi-
tion than it ever was to understand the message. If
planets revolved around that distant sun, if among
them there were worlds on which oceans rolled and
intelligent creatures strove to understand themselves
and the vast universe about them, they have been
destroyed in a mercifully swift, blinding, all-consum-
ing flash. We can form no conception of the violence
of the outburst, even though we behold it. An explo-
sion of a mass of nitro-glycerine as big as the earth
would be like the burning of a match in comparison
a snail-like performance.
Human eyes have never witnessed catastrophes as
colossal as those signalled by these sudden glares. In-
significant blurs so faint that the unaided eye cannot
see them change to luminaries of the first magnitude.
Thus in a few days the new star in Hercules increased
in brightness a hundred thousand times. Only Sirius,
Vega, Capella, Arcturus, Rigel, Procyon, Altair, and
Betelgeuse, the most brilliant fixed stars, ultimately
exceeded it in brilliance.
IO SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
Novae, or new stars, the astronomers call these
sudden apparitions. It is a bad name, suggesting that
orbs blaze forth where there were none before.
Usually there is a faint spot of light on a photograph
made ten, twenty, or thirty years previously to tell
the story of a body that had pursued the even tenor
of its stellar way for millions and millions of years,
only to flare up suddenly and startlingly so that even
unaided terrestial eyes can see it. Even when the
photographic record gives no indication of a luminary
destined some day to explode Nova Aurigae, Nova
Persei, and Nova Cygni are cases in point there is
little reason to talk of 'new stars'. Orbs are not created
in the twinkling of an eye.
As a class novae are the brightest stars in our system
twenty thousand times brighter on an average than
the sun. ' Could we look back upon our system from
some immense distance from which all save the
brightest stars had melted into an unresolved blur,'
says Hubble, ' we should still see the novae as they
flash out, shine for a while, and then fade away from
sight. We actually see such flashes in Andromeda, a
stellar system much like our Milky Way.' If most
outbursts are faint, it is not because they are duller
than that which has appeared in Hercules but because
they are so far away.
The most famous of all novae was that discovered
in November 1572 by Tycho Brahe, then twenty-six
years old, in the constellation Cassiopeia. He dared
not trust his own eyes. Read his account :
A STAR EXPLODES II
Raising my eyes as usual, during one of my wal1(s,
to the well-\nown vault of heaven, 1 observed with
indescribable astonishment near the zenith in Cassio-
peia a radiant fixed star of a magnitude never before
seen. In my amazement 1 doubted the evidence of
my senses. However, to convince myself that it was no
illusion and to have the testimony of others, I sum-
moned my assistants from the observatory and inquired
of them and of all the country people that passed if
they also saw the star that had thus suddenly burst
forth.
Tycho's star rivalled the planet Venus in brilliancy
and was visible at noontide. Never in historic times
has there been another nova like it. Changing from
white to red and then again to white, it faded out of
sight by March 1574. Somewhere in Cassiopeia it still
gleams faintly, but what star it is in that constellation
is not known. With the coarse instruments of the time
it was impossible to indicate positions with great
accuracy.
To Tycho the star was a portent, which he likened
to the halting of the sun at the command of Joshua
and to the luminary that the Magi followed at the
birth of Christ. Kepler held similar views about the
naked-eye nova that he beheld in 1604. To him, the
star of Bethlehem was a nova.
What is the cause of these outbursts? Astronomers
have been asking themselves the question for centuries.
The more that is discovered, the more puzzling does
12 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
it seem. No hypothesis thus far advanced is entirely
satisfactory. According to some, we behold the
consequences of a grazing collision of two stars.
They coalesce to form a new ball of incandescent
vapour.
Mathematicians sharpen their pencils and estimate
the chances of such an encounter. Once in a million
years, the answer reads. Wrong, comment the ob-
servers. Novae are too frequent in the universe at large.
Besides, there was the curious case of Nova Pictoris,
which split and revealed a dark space between the
sundered parts. It may not have been a typical nova,
this Nova Pictoris, but if the collision hypothesis is
valid, that dark space should not have appeared.
Developing a suggestion made by Prof Monck, the
German astronomer Dr Seeliger made interesting de-
ductions which were in high favour for years. There
is dark stuff scattered through space cosmic dust,
vapours, who knows what ? It appears on photographs
when a bright star shines near or through dark matter.
Indeed, on some pictures a star seems to have ploughed
a lane through it. Nova Pictoris, which brightened and
faded several times other novae have done the same
may have encountered now a dense and now a rare
mass of such dark matter as it plunged on.
We know that a meteor flares up as it rushes
through our atmosphere. Here we see what can hap-
pen when a huge star swims into a dark nebula. More-
over, novae are associated with nebulae. Here and
there is a ring of glowing matter, a planetary nebula,
A STAR EXPLODES 13
and in the centre a glowing mass. Are these rings,
perhaps, the wrecks of ancient novae?
Plausible as Seeliger's theory may seem, astronomers
reject it. By friction in the supposed passage of a star
through a nebula heat is generated much too slowly
to account for an almost instantaneous, flash-like erup-
tion.
Astrophysicists are now inclined to attribute stellar
explosions to sheer instability. For some unknown rea-
son a star collapses. The outer layers are blown off and
flung out into space at speeds of hundreds, and even
thousands, of miles a second. Collapse of the core that
remains involves shrinking a purely gravitational
effect. Light, heat, waves of energy are literally
squeezed out. But where are the facts that make
it possible to estimate whether such changes occur
often enough to explain all cases? We indulge in
mere scientific speculation. There is no other way as
yet.
What we know about novae has been learned largely
since the spectroscope was introduced in the last cen-
tury. It is the function of that instrument the essen-
tial element is a prism to split light into its con-
stituent colours. What we have is a rainbow, a spect-
rum in the form of a ribbon-like strip. Each element
glows with its characteristic set of coloured bands and
lines, and each set of bands and lines appears in a
definite part of the spectrum. If a line or band shifts,
a physicist knows that a star is moving towards or
away from us, depending on the direction of the shift.
14 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
Just as a locomotive whistle howls up as it ap-
proaches and down as it recedes, so light howls up and
down as the source travels towards or away from us;
for light, like sound, has its pitch. By measuring these
shifts, velocities can be computed. The spectroscope
therefore reveals the elements in a star or mass of gas,
their physical state and their movement. Stellar rain-
bows in the hands of Drs Wright and Lundmark, Dr
Walter S. Adams of the Mount Wilson Observatory,
and Donald A. Menzel and Miss Cecilia Payne of Har-
vard have made it possible to form a crude picture of
what occurs when a star explodes.
We are asked to imagine a sun which has become
unstable and which has hurled off its outer shell of hot
gas. What remains shrinks by perhaps a few hundred
miles, which is nothing compared with a diameter of
a million miles and more, yet enough to cause such
a rise in temperature that astronomers on the earth
become aware of a blaze.
Like a swelling bubble the shell leaps outwardly
with an ever-enlarging radius at a rate that may be
1000 miles a second and more. In a week the volume
of the shell increases millions of times. It ought to
cool by the mere act of expanding and radiating.
Instead it glows almost as intensely as the star itself,
though there is sometimes evidence of cooling.
At first the shell is opaque. All the radiation from
the star at the centre must fight its way through.
Electrons and ions dash about in riotous activity. Cos-
mic rays, gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet rays
ASTAREXPLODES 15
struggle with this opposition. At last they break
through, but transformed. They are feebler. Once
invisible and highly penetrating, they are now 'soft'.
That is why they can be seen.
In this early stage, during which the brightness of
the whole mass increases enormously, the glow is
brilliant white or bluish-white. Later it turns orange
or reddish. The spectrum tells the story of hydrogen,
iron, calcium, titanium, chromium, silicon, and other
familiar vapours heated until their dancing atoms emit
characteristic waves of light. Similar metallic vapours
appear on the sun. Towards the last the star turns
greenish. In the later stages the once opaque shell
becomes transparent, so that cosmic rays and other
powerful rays penetrate easily enough. Luckily for us
our own atmosphere blocks them.
Soon after the maximum brightness is attained the
nova declines*. In a few weeks it is but a weak re-
minder of its brief spectacular glory. Steadily it fades
for months and years. Then it settles down as an
ordinary star among millions in its part of the heaven.
Sometimes there is a fitful pulsing of light an indica-
tion that equilibrium has not yet been completely
attained. It is a smaller but a brighter and hotter star
that thus marks the end of an explosion.
Notice that in this picture of the rise and fall of a
nova we refer to cosmic rays which pour out of the
central star within the shell of gas and vapour. Have
we here the origin of the mysterious radiation which
Dr Millikan believes to be an intense but invisible
l6 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
form of light ? Dr W. Baadc of the University of Cali-
fornia and Dr F. Zwicky of the California Institute
of Technology have suggested the possibility.
From a statistical study made at Harvard by Dr
Bailey it seems that one or two novae reach naked-eye
visibility every year, though few are actually dis-
covered. In the same period at least ten attain the
ninth magnitude. (Ptolemy, the first man to arrange
the stars in the order of their brilliancy, called the
brightest 'first-magnitude' stars and stars just visible
to the naked eye 'sixth-magnitude' stars. A ninth-
magnitude nova is one-sixteenth as bright as the
faintest naked-eye stars.) Bailey concludes that in the
course of a few million years there would be as many
spent and broken-down novae in the sky as there are
visible stars.
Every star has therefore been a nova in its time.
Consider what this means in the light of modern
astronomical photography. Billions of stars are now
caught on plates. If these orbs represent but a tenth of
the actual number that still await discovery, we pre-
pare ourselves to think of novae as commonplace
phenomena. It may even be that stars have been
novae more than once.
A more recent statistical examination of novae has
been made by Dr Conrad Lonnqvist of the Royal Ob-
servatory of the University of Lund, Sweden. Accord-
ing to his findings, the average star explodes and
becomes a nova once in 400,000,000 years. Lonnqvist
gives himself ample elbow-room when he deals with
A STAR EXPLODES
such astronomical probabilities. His figures are ad-
mittedly wrong by a trifle of 300,000,000 years one way
or the other. Three hundred million years! Time
enough for mountains to be shaken and worn down,
for seas to dry up, for radio-activity to become a mere
tradition handed down from an almost mythical
twentieth century and for the human race to throw
off the last vestige of savagery.
If Bailey and Hubble are right, we naturally wonder
what is to become of our own solar system. Our sun is
a star which happens to have planets revolving around
it. It has a photosphere, a kind of luminous shell or
atmosphere of fiercely glowing gas that for ever con-
ceals the core beneath. Tongues of red hydrogen leap
up from that shell and sunspots whirl within it. Both
testify to terrific forces at play.
The mere thought of what would happen if the sun
should burst as that star in Hercules did 1300 years ago
is enough to make one shudder. Nothing could sur-
vive an outburst of energy that would inundate the
solar system. A glare that would strike us blind, a
flood of radiation cosmic, ultra-violet, electric
would pour out. In a few days the outwardly travelling
shell of incandescent vapour would rush on the earth.
Soon it would engulf Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. There
is even the probability that it would sweep out in an
ever-widening sphere until it embraced Uranus,
Neptune, and Pluto. Shells as vast have been
observed.
All this would happen with a suddenness of which
B
l8 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
we have no inkling. The first blast would be enough
to blot out all life. The planets, as they swam in their
orbits around the transformed sun, would be heated up
like meteors. Once more they would become balls of
vapour and mingle with that shell of death and
destruction. In the end they would be dissipated like
wraiths of smoke. Nothing would be left of a system
which may be unique in all the wide expanse of the
universe. Then, after months, and perhaps years, the
sun would subside. It would be a smaller and more
brilliant sun a white star drifting in solitude through
space.
Will cosmic history repeat itself? In other words,
will some wandering star again sweep into our part
of the heavens and by sheer gravitational attraction
pull out of the new sun streamers of gas and then pass
on? Such at least is the accepted theory of what hap-
pened billions of years ago, when there were as yet no
planets. For out of the streamers the planets and their
satellites were formed by a process of shrivelling and
knotting.
Perhaps the cycle will be repeated. Perhaps the new
sun, smaller but more brilliant, will again fall prey to
a wanderer. Perhaps a new solar system and a new
earth will be born. Perhaps there will be a new birth
of life, with a bit of primeval protoplasm emerging
from the sea to begin anew the old slow ascent that
eventually leads to swaying trees, to animals that crawl
and run and birds that cleave the air, and at last
A STAR EXPLODES 19
to something like man who will gaze wonderingly
at the heavens above and detect afar a flash that
tells of a sun's destruction and of his own cyclic
career.
II. The Sun: New Aspects
SOME 93,000,000 MILES DISTANT BLAZES THE SUN, A MINOR
luminary among the hundreds of millions in the uni-
verse. As the nearest star, it is of extraordinary im-
portance to the astrophysicist. Why is it hot? Why
does it shine? How long has it glowed? Of what is it
made? What is its temperature?
Astronomers have been asking these questions ever
since there were medicine-men to preside over festivals
held in the sun's honour and sacrifice animals to its
glory and power. From decade to decade the answers
are modified in the light of new discoveries. With the
invention of the telescope, 'close-ups' and therefore ac-
curate description and inference became possible. The
sun proved to be not a homogeneous ball but some-
thing like an onion. There were layers of matter.
First comes the corona, stretching out perhaps
350,000 miles and so wondrously thin that during
a total eclipse comets can pass through it without
being retarded, and so strongly suggestive of auroral
streamers that it must be electrical in its nature. Be-
cause of the brightness of our sky, only during the
fleeting moments of a total solar eclipse is it seen. On
the airless moon it would be otherwise. Perch yourself
on a lunar crag. The weird corona would spread out
like a halo every day. And behind the sun a black sky
studded with stars would appear stars that never
twinkle.
Within the corona, hugging the outer rim of the
sun, lies the chromosphere a sea of crimson hydrogen
5000 miles deep, agitated by tempests compared with
21
22 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
which ours are as zephyrs. Red fangs leap out with a
speed one hundred times that of a rifle-bullet for dis-
tances of 10,000 to 350,000 miles. 'Prominences', the
astronomer calls them. Some are politely classed as
'quiescent' for no other reason than that they spread
out mushroom-like, with stems that apparently run
down into the photosphere, two layers down.
Not so long ago the red eruptions of the chromo-
sphere were so many puzzles. Why should hydrogen
be tossed up at all, considering the tremendous, in-
exorable pull of gravitation more than twenty-seven
times as great on the sun as on the earth? On this
basis a 150-pound man would weigh two tons in the
chromosphere; all the solar wrappings ought to be
compressed into a layer less than a mile in thickness;
an unsupported body, a mass of gas for example,
would fall 450 feet in the first second, 400 miles in
a minute, 230,000 miles in half an hour. Yet these
prominences last sometimes for more than a month.
What holds them up ?
The astrophysicist supplies the answer. Radiation
exerts pressure. * With a sufficiently strong light one
could knock a man down just as surely as with a jet of
water from a fire-hose,' says Jeans. If we do not notice
the pressure of light on the earth it is because it
amounts to only 75,000 tons for the whole illuminated
hemisphere. Within the sun the effect is far more
formidable enough to fling out great fantastic
wraiths of hydrogen despite the pull of gravitation.
Within the scarlet chromosphere, and 1000 miles
THE SUN: NEW ASPECTS 23
thick, is the 'reversing layer', so called because of its
effect on bright lines of the spectrum when seen under
the right conditions. Deeper still lies the photosphere,
a layer of incandescent cloud of unknown thickness
to us the real sun.
Galileo saw spots on the sun. That was almost the
natural result of the invention of the telescope in 1608.
Keen observer, shrewd reasoner that he was, he did
not make the common mistake of regarding the spots
as planets that stood out against the blazing back-
ground of the sun. 'Bourbonian stars', as the French
called them? Nonsense. These black patches were on
the very face of the sun. Galileo's explanation was not
received with favour. Blemishes on that bright face,
the very symbol of purity and perfection? It seemed
like blasphemy.
Galileo, after all, was but a describer of what he
saw. It took decades of patient observation to infer the
utter dependence of the earth on the spots and this by
carefully noting when they came and went. Schwabe,
an indefatigable German, showed the way and im-
paired his eyesight in gathering statistics about them.
For twenty years he watched and counted, noted the
number of spots day after day, and at last announced
that sunspot maxima occur on an average every 11-4
years. Ninety years of observation has enabled astro-
nomers to make only a slight correction. The average
period is now placed at u-i years.
This tireless watching of the spots by astronomers
24 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
brought forth the astonishing fact that the sun docs not
spin all in one piece, like a ball of white-hot metal.
The greater the distance from the sun's equator, the
slower is the rate of spin. At the solar equator it is
24-65 days; at latitude 35 degrees, '26*63 days; at tne
poles about 34 days. But the spots themselves rarely
appear in high latitudes. They flank the equator be-
tween the fifth and fortieth parallels.
Thousands of drawings and photographs of the
spots have been made. Always there is a central
purplish patch the 'umbra'. Fringing it is a texture
of tossing plumes, lacy filaments the penumbra.
Look at any picture of the spot and you say at once :
* That's a hole.' Astronomers were once of the same
opinion. But instead of revealing some awful inferno
these 'holes' seem to conceal something. They are
dark, and darkness means that they must have a
temperature lower than that of the dazzling gas
around them. Hold the burning end of a cigar against
a brilliant electric arc and it looks black. So on the
sun. The spots are incandescent for all their blackness,
but cool compared with the glowing masses around
them. A supposedly 'black' spot with a diameter of
perhaps 50,000 miles is a hundred times brighter than
the full moon.
No longer are the spots regarded as holes. There can
be no question of their real nature. They are cyclones
like those that lift roofs of houses in Kansas spin-
ning, elevated funnels of hot hydrogen, evidences of
storms on a star that is itself one colossal storm.
THE SUN: NEW ASPECTS 25
'Small', an astronomer would call a spot that
measures less than 8000 miles in diameter, and there
have been some spots with diameters of 50,000. All are
flaming tornadoes, vortices out of which fiercely glow-
ing gases are tossed, into which the earth might be
dropped without touching the sides. Kansas takes to
the cyclone cellar when a tornado sweeps by and sucks
wells dry. But what of a whirlwind as big as the whole
earth a whirlwind of leaping, flaming gas? More-
over, what of a whirlwind which is not only of this
colossal size but which lasts for days, weeks, months?
Yet the physicist likens these fiercely glowing vor-
tices of gas to refrigerators. When we think of cold we
think of frost, snow, and ice. He thinks of differences
in temperature. Freezing water has a temperature of
22 degrees Fahrenheit. The thermometer in the
*j o
kitchen itself on a hot summer day may register 82
degrees. So the white-enamelled insulated box and
coils give us a temperature drop of 50 degrees a
triumph of mechanical engineering.
Turn to the sun and see what happens. That spin-
ning tornado which we call a spot sucks hot gases from
the interior and cools them by expansion exactly
what happens in the coils of a refrigerator. But the
temperature drop 2000 degrees! Such is the differ-
ence between the 6000 degrees absolute (10,000 degrees
Fahrenheit) of the solar surface and the temperature
of a spot.
When these solar tornadoes are at their height, com-
passes go wild; powerful earth currents are induced
26 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
that sometimes demoralize the telegraph services;
auroras shimmer with unwonted brilliancy. These are
clearly magnetic phenomena. So astrophysicists natur-
ally looked for magnetic effects in the spots. It was
long before they found them.
To the late Dr George E. Hale belongs the honour
of proving that every sunspot is a huge magnet. He
found that the polarities of a pair of spots are always
opposed. Furthermore, if the eastern spot of a pair has
a northward polarity, so will it be with the eastern
spots of all other pairs in the northern solar hemi-
sphere. In the southern hemisphere the corresponding
spots will have a south-pole magnetic orientation.
When a new cycle occurs the polarities are all reversed.
Why this should be so, no one knows.
In forty observatories scattered over the world deli-
cate magnets are suspended, each linked with the sun
by invisible yet tangible bonds. Something besides
light rushes across the chasm of 93,000,000 miles that
separates sun and earth. Electrons, wrecked atoms
called ions, whole molecules perhaps, are shot from
the solar surface and from the spots. Fifty miles from
the earth's surface the invisible stream is largely
stopped by the atmosphere. And so the magnets in
the observatories twitch or vibrate. * Storms ! ' they
seem to cry. But the storms are not of lashing wind
and rain, but of electrons. At such times the aurora
glows with more than its usual magnificence and com-
passes wobble.
Magnetic storms occur from two to five times a year
THE SUN: NEW ASPECTS 27
and last for about two days. When sunspots are big
the disturbances are apt to be violent. For more than
twenty-five years daily records have been kept at the
forty observatories. If sunspots reappear in a cycle at
twenty-seven-day intervals, as they often do, the ob-
servatory charts show a twenty-seven-day correspond-
ence of earthly terrestrial magnetic disturbances. The
correspondence is not exact, yet striking enough.
Twenty-seven days happens to be the period of the
sun's rotation. Yet the most that an authority on
terrestrial magnetism will permit himself to say is that
magnetic activity must be attributed to definite regions
on the sun's surface and that there is an eleven-year
cycle of magnetic disturbances just as there is an
eleven-year cycle of sunspots.
So we look for causes. Imagine something like the
revolving nozzle of a garden hose, a nozzle as big as
the sun. It sprays electrons, ions, and perhaps other
particles into space. The sprays fall in arcs like drops
of water. In a day and a half the abyss is bridged. But
a minute elapses between the first impact and the time
the earth is completely enveloped by the magnetic
storm. Only by some such mechanism is it possible to
explain why the magnets in the forty observatories
begin to vibrate almost as soon as a big spot appears.
Hardly had the eleven-year sunspot cycle been estab-
lished evidence of rhythm when the attempt was
made to correlate it with similarly recurring pheno-
mena on the earth. This is the primrose path that
leads either to astounding scientific congruences or to
28 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
a mild form of lunacy. It is possible to take any rail-
way time-table and develop from the hours at which
trains arrive or depart from a terminal a striking
relationship between the appearance and disappear-
ance of sunspots. There would be no difficulty in
linking the increase in nervous indigestion with the
rise of broadcasting or in showing that the spread of
the cafeteria coincides with an appalling increase in
the cancer death-rate.
Human life is a series of events, some of which recur
periodically, such as birthdays, pay-days, harvest
seasons, tennis-matches, and financial depressions. To
superimpose one curve on another, both expressing
rhythms; to show that the two agree; to deduce cause
and effect in this manner what is apparently more
logical? So we find that not only have the mystics
tried to discover whether our supposedly voluntary
acts are really influenced by sunspots, but also the
scientists themselves.
Back in 1875 Prof W. Stanley Jevons, one of the
most distinguished of British economists, developed a
theory of Sir William Herschel's that there is a rela-
tion between the sunspot cycle, weather, and crops. He
wrote monograph after monograph to show that sun-
spots affected the price of grain and that they were
even responsible for depressions.
In 1931 Inigo Jones, director of the Bureau of
Seasonal Forecasting in Queensland, made out what
seemed to be a strong case for the solar control of
Australian weather. With much ingenuity he showed
THE SUN: NEW ASPECTS 29
that the sunspot cycle is caused by the movements
of the planets, especially colossal Jupiter, which has
a periodicity of n-86 years, and that irregularities
caused by Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune account for
the accepted u-i. His tables and curves indicate that
every 164 years there is abnormal weather because of
the conjunctions of planets and sunspots. The sup-
porting evidence is almost overwhelming. Yet it is
precisely the kind of evidence that astrologists adduce
to prove that when certain planets are in conjunction
it is well to stay at home and avoid assassination by a
dark man with gleaming eyes.
And then there is Henri Memery, who in 1932
brought out a treatise (L'Inftuence Solaire et le Progrts
de la Meteorologie) in which he advanced the theory
that sunspots evince a tendency to increase and
decrease at certain definite times of the year and that
for fifty years there has been a clear relationship
between the spottiness of the sun and abnormal rain-
fall and temperature. He bends figures and cycles
so readily to his will that he finds no difficulty in
proving that when there is a marked increase in sun-
spots there is a rise in the temperature in Southern
France. His critics demand more exact statistical
methods than he has employed.
We turn to Russia and we find Dr W. B. Schota-
kovitch, whose work has received the attention and
the implied endorsement of so able a meteorologist as
Dr H. H. Clayton. After studying the records from
1869 to 1920, Schotakovitch decided that many spots
30 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
mean much rain and that this excess rain is associated
in some regions with increased evaporation. Since this
happens to agree with the widely held view that
during epochs of sunspot maximum the earth receives
a greater amount of solar heat, we have this scheme : in-
creased heat, increased evaporation, increased rainfall.
But the boldest of all these jugglers of statistics
is Prof A. L. Tchijevsky, whose revelations were
presented in 1927 before the American Meteorological
Society. If anyone wants to link the crash of 1929 and
all the subsequent misfortunes with sunspots, he will
find all the evidence he wants in Tchijevsky's deduc-
tions and predictions. There was a sunspot maximum
between 1927 and 1929; there were also pronounced
psychic effects in previous maxima. Ergo, the world
must look before the end of 1929 for events which will
shake minds and affect progress. The prediction was
right. But what of the logic ? Is a theory true merely
because it appears to work?
Tchijevsky undertook the herculean task of going
back to the fifth century B.C. and correlating sunspots
with 'gigantic mass insanity, elementary violence, epi-
demics of murders, the invention of demoniac forms
of torturing and killing', not to mention wars, mass
excitements, pilgrimages and religious movements.
Attila, Mohammed, Joan of Arc, Napoleon, Richelieu,
Gambetta and Lenin were most active and brilliant
when sunspots were at their height, according to
Tchijevsky.
The association of sunspots and rainfall was also the
THE SUN: NEW ASPECTS 3!
lifework of Dr W. P. Koppen, who studied meteoro-
logical records for several hundred widely scattered
stations. That there is some relation, accurate measure-
ments of the sun's surface with the pyrheliometer
seem to prove. It is clear enough that when sunspots
are most numerous the sun is at its hottest. The effect
is to stir up the earth's atmosphere, just as when the
draughts of a stove are opened. There is increased
evaporation, which means more clouds and therefore
more rainstorms. The net result is that the earth is
cooler when the sun is hottest, which is not so para-
doxical as it seems, in the light of the explanation
given. But an acid-proof case for the influence of sun-
spots on weather has still to be made out.
What lies below the photosphere, on which the
magnetic spots drift, must always be mere conjecture.
Who can hope to pierce 432,500 miles of gas (the
radius of the sun) and discover what is at the core of
a star more than 92,000,000 miles away? And yet the
modern astrophysicist boldly attempts the feat because
of the confidence that his knowledge of atoms and
electrons has given him. In the revolutions and leap-
ings of electrons in earthly atoms he reads the story of
the sun. Once we revered Helmholtz and Kelvin as
the final authorities on solar processes. Now we sit
at the feet of Eddington and Jeans, physicists whose
views on the activities of solar atoms and electrons
have made it necessary for astronomers to change their
conception of the sun.
32 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
If he can explain why the sun shines at all, the
physicist can explain nearly everything. According to
the easy reasoning of past centuries, the sun burned
like a mass of fuel. A sun made of solid coal would
last about 5000 years, by Lord Kelvin's reckoning.
Could showers of meteors keep the fires burning?
More calculations disposed of that supposition. A mass
of meteors equal to that of the whole earth would
hardly supply the solar furnace for a century. Besides,
the necessary infall would double the sun's weight
in 30,000,000 years and disarrange the whole solar
system.
It was the German physicist Helmholtz who ad-
vanced an explanation satisfactory to modern astro-
physicists. The sun is a mass of gas. It is contracting.
But by how much? He applied his mathematical
calipers and obtained 250 feet a year. Heat and light
were being squeezed out of the sun.
Then and there a controversy sprang up between
the physicists and the geologists. Lord Kelvin cal-
culated that the shrinking process had begun not more
than about 40,000,000 years ago, and Newcomb that
it could not continue for more than an additional
7,000,000. The sun's span of life was therefore a matter
of perhaps 47,000,000 years. The geologists protested
and pointed out that some of the earth's rocks were
100,000,000 years old, and that the sun, which was at
least as old as the earth, was far from being the
blackened cinder it should be.
When the radio-active elements wer- discovered, the
THE SUN: NEW ASPECTS 33
case of the geologists was even stronger. It takes
uranium about 1,300,000,000 years to break down
spontaneously into various elements (one of them is
radium) before it is reduced to lead. It must have
taken the earth still longer to cool and form rocks.
Even the geologists had been much too unimagina-
tive in estimating the age of the ball on which we live.
When the electron theory of matter was formu-
lated the real source of the sun's great energy was dis-
covered. ' We started to explore the inside of a star,'
said Eddington; ' we soon found ourselves exploring
the inside of an atom.' By which he meant that atomic
energy accounts for the sun's radiance.
The forces that tie an atom together are tremendous.
Yet outer electrons can be torn away, whereupon an
atom becomes an 'ion'. It takes energy to strip an
atom. The sun has a surface temperature of at least
10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. At the centre, the tempera-
ture may be 40,000,000 degrees. A speck of iron heated
at Chicago to the calculated temperature of the sun's
interior would radiate enough heat to blast all life
within a radius of 1000 miles.
A temperature of 40,000,000 degrees means that
molecules move fast. At ordinary room temperatures
air-molecules rush about with a speed of 500 yards a
second; at 40,000,000 degrees they would dash about
at more than 60 miles a second. In gravitational con-
traction we have the energy that raises the temperature
of the stars until they glow internally with a terrific,
inconceivable heat. And in this heat we have the force
34 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
that disrupts atoms into their individual electrons,
brings about the transmutation of elements, and
releases more energy. Now we arc ready to contem-
plate Eddington's sensational picture of the sun's
interior :
Dishevelled atoms tear along at 100 miles a second,
their normal array of electrons being torn from them
in the scrimmage. The lost electrons are speeding one
hundred times faster to find new resting-places. Let us
follow the progress of one of them. There is almost a
collision as an electron approaches an atomic nucleus,
but putting on speed it sweeps round in a sharp curve.
Sometimes there is a sideslip at the curve, but the
electron goes on with increased or reduced energy.
After a thousand narrow shaves, all happening within
a thousand-millionth of a second, the hectic career is
ended by a worse sideslip than usual. The electron is
fairly caught and attached to an atom. But scarcely has
it taken up its place when an X-ray bursts into the
atom. Sucking up the energy of the ray, the electron
darts off again on its next adventure.
Jeans carries the process further : not only are atoms
being reduced to their individual protons and
electrons, as Eddington so vividly pictures, but the
protons and electrons are themselves being annihilated.
And the proof of this annihilation is to be found in
the sun's fierce light and heat. Or, as Jeans puts it :
* The sun is destroying its substance ir order that we
THE SUN: NEW ASPECTS 35
may live. . . . The atoms in the sun arc in effect
bottles of energy spilled throughout the universe in the
form of light and heat.' Yet so enormous is the sun's
supply and so great is the energy content of each
bottle that even after having blazed for at least 7 or
8,000,000,000 years Jeans's estimate of the sun's age
there is still enough left for many more billions of
years to come. The geologists now have all the time
they demand to explain how the earth acquired its
rocks, seas, and continents.
It cannot be denied that there is some guessing about
these billions of years, but it is guessing with a solid
foundation, based as it is on the relation between the
sun's luminosity and its weight. The heavier a star, the
brighter will it be. But the ratio between weight and
luminosity is not what might be supposed. If the sun
were only half as massive as it is, it would radiate not
one-half as much light and heat, but one-eighth.
Similarly, if it were twice as heavy as it is, it would
shine not twice but eight times as brightly. About
2,000,000,000 years ago the sun had 1-00013 times its
present weight. When the earth was born, some
3,000,000,000 years ago, the sun must have been much
as it is now. To the modern astrophysicist the sun is
still young, though to the Victorians it was guttering
to its end.
It is because of the relation of mass to brightness that
both Jeans and Eddington agree on the sun's age. Go
back, say 7,600,000,000 years, and the sun becomes
impossibly heavy about one hundred times as heavy
36 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
as it is now. An age of 7 or 8,000,000,000 years gives
just the right weight and brightness.
But how does Jeans know what is the right bright-
ness? By comparing the sun with, other stars of the
same type. It turns out that each square inch of the
sun's surface radiates about fifty horse-power, which
is generated by the annihilation of matter at the rate
of about a twentieth of an ounce in a century. For the
sun as a whole this insignificant amount adds up to
more than 4,000,000 tons a second. Tomorrow the sun
will weigh 360,000,000,000 tons less than it does to-
day. Yet it is so huge that it will shine for at least
15,000,000,000 years longer.
Until Jeans and Eddington gave us these new views,
the sun was supposed to be a tremendous glowing ball
of gas. But Jeans showed that a gaseous sun would
either collapse or explode. He imagines the core to be
liquid. Only the outer wrappings are gaseous in the
true sense. At the core, he holds, there are superactive
atoms much heavier than uranium or radium. We
have ninety-two kinds of elements on the earth; if
Jeans is right, there may be more kinds deep in the
solar core. A few short-lived elements heavier than
uranium (our earthly ninety-second) have been pro-
duced in the laboratory.
Since the sun is radiating itself away and losing
360,000,000,000 tons every day, its gravitational clutch
on the earth must be slackening. Jeans has calculated
that we are spiralling from the sun at the rate of little
more than a yard in a century. In 1,000,000,000 years
THE SUN: NEW ASPECTS 37
we shall be 101,530,000 instead of 92,300,000 miles
away. By that time the sun will have lost 6 per cent,
of its present heat through radiation, and its energy-
producing capacity will have been reduced by 20 per
cent. The terrestrial temperature will be 54 degrees
Fahrenheit lower than it is now, and the earth will be
reduced to an icy ball swimming through space. If they
have not evaporated long before then, the oceans will
be frozen masses.
Will man have perished ? He has the power of creat-
ing an artificial environment for himself. He knows
how to heat his homes and his factories. More than
glacial cold is needed to exterminate him. But, as the
earth drifts away with the passing of the centuries, a
temperature that was once glacial and tolerable with
the aid of science will approach the absolute zero of
interstellar space.
The curtain falls when the atmosphere is precipi-
tated first in blizzards of carbon dioxide and finally in
a downpour of liquid air. No inventive ingenuity can
stave ofi death. After having stumbled into a universe
that was never destined for life, man will be blotted
out by forces that were hostile to him from the begin-
ning of time and over which he triumphed for a brief
hour, ' leaving the universe,' in Jeans's words, ' as
though he had never been.'
///. Birth and Death of the Moon
IN THE REMOTE PAST, THE EARTH WAS UNDOUBTEDLY A
perfect sphere of gas. The late Sir George Darwin, son
of the great Charles, threw himself back mathemati-
cally hundreds of millions of years, and so did Henri
Poincare. They beheld in their equations a spectacle
the like of which was never presented elsewhere in the
solar system beheld the gaseous earth spinning faster
and faster on its axis so that it ceased to be a perfect
sphere and assumed the shape of a spheroid. In their
mathematical minds' eyes they could see millions of
years slipping by and the earth spinning still more
dizzily. Additional equations revealed the earth, under
this accelerating rotation, changing from a spheroid
into something shaped like an egg.
The egg-shaped mass of gas cooled, became a liquid,
and continued to spin faster and faster. Darwin saw a
temporary collapse, causing the egg to assume the
shape of a pear. More millions of years elapsed. The
stalk end of the pear developed a bulb and the waist of
the stalk became thinner and thinner.
So fast was the earth now spinning that the day was
only three hours long, a velocity sixteen times faster
than that of a rifle-bullet. Tides raised by the sun
aided centrifugal force in distorting the earth. The
liquid pear, coated by this time with a crust some 35
miles thick, could not withstand the combination.
A cataclysm of terrific magnitude occurred. Five
thousand cubic miles of matter constituting the bulb
were wrenched loose. In that stupendous convulsion
the moon was born. Some astronomers profess to sec
19
40 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
in the basin now filled by the Pacific Ocean the scar of
that planetary catastrophe.
No other satellite had an origin like this. To an
astronomer on Mars the earth and the moon appear as
they really are a double planet of marvellous beauty.
Physicists have thrown the moon on their mathe-
matical scales. It weighs 73 trillion tons one-eightieth
of the earth's mass. Of all satellites in the solar system
none approaches the moon in size and mass.
The moon was not forthwith hurled 239,000 miles
into space, whence it now shines down. At first it
revolved around the earth at grazing distance. For
whole geological epochs its destiny trembled in the
balance. Had the speed of rotation been but a fraction
of a minute faster than it was the moon would have
crashed back upon the earth. But the complicated
mechanism that governs planets and satellites decreed
that the moon should slow down so that the month
exceeded the three-hour day by a second or two. Thus
it became possible for a lunar tidal wave to creep ahead
of the moon. The tide applied its frictional brakes, and
54,000,000 years ago the moon began very slowly to
spiral away. Moreover, the earth's day lengthened, and
so did the moon's. The lunar astronomical day is now
a terrestrial month.
In considering these past changes in the length of
the lunar day, it must be remembered that the earth
was a liquid mass. It had what physicists call a natural
period of vibration. By rhythmic shaking a wave could
be raised, which depended on the size and shape of
BIRTH AND DEATH OF THE MOON 4!
the earth for its period. The fluid or semi-fluid earth
in that remote time was subject to just such oscilla-
tions. They had a natural period of two hours. But
every two hours the sun was also producing two tidal
bulges on opposite sides of the earth. Tap a pendulum
at just the right moment and its swing can be
lengthened. A similar effect was produced on the
earth. The oscillations of liquid matter were like the
swings of a pendulum; the sun raised bulges at just
the right moment to agree with the swings and in-
crease them. No liquid planet could withstand the
combination. A bulge broke off. Thus the moon was
born.
The moon began to creep away from the earth as
soon as it was born. At first the day and the month
were of equal length four or five hours. As the moon
receded, both lengthened, but the month more rapidly.
Ultimately the moon will retrace its course. Rigid
and frozen as it is, nevertheless it will be distorted
the nearer it comes. There is now a bulge in the direc-
tion of the earth, a bulge that goes back to a time
when the moon was plastic.
When the moon comes within two-fifths of its
present distance from the earth the bulge will be sub-
jected to tremendous pulling strains. Astronomers will
witness exciting events. Lunar mountains will topple.
There will be great avalanches. On the earth cracks
will open in which cities will be engulfed. Terrible
earthquakes will shake the planet.
It is easy to imagine the terror of mankind. The
42 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
earth is doomed as a habitable place. In the sky the
moon is poised, not the moon that we see a mere
half-crown held at arm's length but an awe-inspiring
moon covering a twentieth of the sky. Huge rocks
are attracted by the earth, some of them a mile in
diameter. Luckily they do not rain down on Europe
or America, but travel around the earth in orbits of
their own. For some centuries astronomers watch the
process. Then the inevitable downpour deluges the
earth.
Mountains crack on the moon and their fragments,
irresistibly drawn to the earth, beat down relentlessly
on all that men cherish. The sky is aflame with
meteorites, heated to incandescence by friction with
our atmosphere. The rocks and meteorites that are not
wholly consumed fall down, bury themselves with
loud explosions, and heat the surrounding country
thousands of degrees. Forests burn up. Oceans boil.
Astronomers have seen the end coming for a millen-
nium and longer. The human race long ago sank its
hatreds, its selfish thefts of territory, its economic
jealousies, in a fine co-operative effort to save itself
from extinction. In vain. Vast subterranean refuges
dug beneath the North and South Poles shelter a few
hundred thousand who manage to escape the terrific
pelting from the awful moon above. What are their
chances in a steaming ocean licking away at the Great
Ice Barrier of the South or the glaciers, floes, and ice-
bergs of the North?
The end comes when the moon is rent asunder
BIRTH AND DEATH OF THE MOON 43
20,000 miles distant from the earth. The bombardment
is more terrific than ever, and the heat engendered by
the collision of fragments with the earth is such that
nothing can withstand it. The sky is ablaze with
white-hot meteorites. In the subterranean refuges the
last men have long since gasped out their lives. News-
papers on Venus announce the sensational news :
' MOON CRASHES INTO EARTH AT LAST ! ' Yes, at last.
For the Venusians have been awaiting the end for
centuries.
Around the earth revolves a ring of meteorites all
that is left of the moon. And the earth drifts on, a
blackened ball on which oceans once heaved, air made
the azure sky a delight to the eye, green trees rustled
in the wind, and man struggled up the long path of
evolution that led from the first bit of animated proto-
plasm to something like divine intelligence. Who
knows but the old planetary ruin may bloom again?
The cosmos has its cycles.
IV. Life in the Solar System
SOME BILLIONS OF YEARS AGO A COLOSSAL STAR SWAM INTO
our part of the heavens. It drifted near our sun and
by the sheer gravitational power of its mass pulled out
of the sun long streamers of gas. The wanderer passed
on. The streamers shrivelled into globes that became
our planets. So runs the prevailing theory of the solar
system's origin.
The odds are a hundred million to one against such
an encounter. Hence Eddington remarks : ' The solar
system is not a typical product of the development of
a star; it is not even a common variety of development;
it is a freak.'
There are many reasons for supposing that the solar
system may have been created thus. Jeans has pointed
out that 'the long filament pulled out of the sun is
likely to have been richest in matter in its middle parts,
these parts having been pulled out when the second
star was nearest and its gravitational pull the
strongest'. String the planets in a line but preserve
their relative distances from one another, draw a line
around them, and you have a cigar. In the middle of
the cigar are Jupiter and Saturn, the two largest planets.
If we pursue the inquiry in Eddington's frame of
mind we find that each one of the planets in the
system is in its turn a freak. No two have identical
sizes and masses or identical lengths of day and night,
or identical atmospheres, or axes tilted at identical
angles. Despite their common origin the planets differ
far more than do the children of the same family.
It is because of the uniqueness of the solar system
45
46 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
and the uniqueness of the earth that life is a precarious,
exciting cosmic adventure. It literally hangs by a
thread. Tilt the axis of the earth so that it assumes a
new angle to the ecliptic (the great circle of the celes-
tial sphere which is the apparent orbit of the sun, so
called because eclipses can occur only when the moon
is on or near this line), lengthen or shorten the day
or year materially, rob the atmosphere of its oxygen
and water vapour, change the globular mass and there-
fore the attraction of gravitation, or greatly increase
or decrease the distance from the sun, and every plant
and animal perishes.
A combination of a dozen known conditions and
perhaps many more that are not known made it
possible for the first bit of protoplasmic ooze to become
animate, reproduce itself, and, what is more, evolve
through the sponge, fish, reptile, bird, and mammal
into Buddha, Leonardo, and Beethoven. The many
essentials of life are so remarkably interrelated that it
seems as if being alive cannot be fortuitous, as if
it is the very purpose of nature to experiment with a
thousand million stars to produce one little world for
the creation of protoplasm capable of evolving into a
myriad organic forms.
All this is borne in upon us by the recent discoveries
that have been made about the atmospheres of the
major planets. The astrophysicist with the aid of his
spectroscope transports himself through millions of
miles to worlds incredibly terrifying and beautiful.
Here, for example, are Drs Slipher, Adol, and Wildt
LIFE IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM 47
in different parts of America and Europe piecing
together the story of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, and
here Drs Walter S. Adams and Theodore Dunham of
Mount Wilson revealing new facts about Venus.
Spectroscopes were known fifty years ago. Why did
we have to wait so long for these new discoveries?
Because new techniques were needed rather than new
instruments.
Sunlight may be likened to a noise made by hun-
dreds of instruments. Just as we cannot tell merely by
hearing a noise what instruments are involved, so we
cannot tell merely by looking at sunlight or starlight
what elements are producing it. What we need is a
filter to sift out one kind of light from another. By
studying the different kinds of light thus sorted it is
possible to identify the sources.
With the modern spectroscope the primary colours
are broken up into thousands of coloured bands and
lines, which appear in definite places in the spectrum
and thus make it possible not only to identify the
elements that glow in a star but also to deduce much
about their state. When, therefore, the astrophysicist
sees a certain yellow line he says at once : ' Sodium.'
If he sees red ones he says : * Hydrogen.' So with
oxygen, nitrogen, strontium all the ninety-two
elements.
In the case of the planets the tell-tale bands and lines
arc found chiefly in the visible red and invisible infra-
red portions of the spectrum. When a chemical was
found for making photographic emulsions respond to
48 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
invisible red rays it was as if scales had fallen from
the mind's eye.
But even if chemistry thus came to the aid of the
astrophysicist, the task of discovering the conditions
on a planet so remote that even in the most powerful
telescope it is no larger than a sixpenny piece was not
easy. The lines and coloured bands of these planetary
rainbows or spectra are faint. There are probably some
that are still invisible, for all the improvements made
in emulsions.
Ever since there were spectroscopes strange orange
bands had been noted in the rainbow-like spectra of
Jupiter and Saturn. About 1905 Dr V. M. Slipher of
the late Percival Lowell's Flagstaff Observatory found
that the bands of Uranus and Neptune were even
stronger and that there were others in Jupiter and
Saturn so faint that no one had seen them before.
After studying Slipher's photographs Prof R. Wildt
of Gottingen, Germany, published in 1932 the con-
clusion that the strong bands probably came from
ammonia and methane. But certainty was wanted.
What the physicist does in this case is to bring the
planets to the laboratory. That is, he creates the condi-
tions which are supposed to prevail on them. Enter his
sanctum sanctorum. There are no planets in miniature,
no surroundings that suggest the study of a medieval
astrologer. Steel bottles of ammonia, methane, and
hydrogen, a long tube in which an atmosphere of
these gases is imprisoned at the right pressure, a specto-
graph to record the bands and lines into which a beam
LIFE IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM 49
of light that shines through the tubes is broken that
is all.
Lines that are faint in the spectra of the actual
planets now stand out prominently, besides others
that are not seen at all particularly in the infra-red
region. It is as if we had found the missing segments
of an incomplete jig-saw puzzle and fitted them into
the gaps that awaited them. With the aid of such
apparatus Dr Dunham of Mount Wilson filled in the
details of the rather coarse picture obtained by direct
spectroscopic study of the planets and reached the con-
clusion that Jupiter and Saturn have atmospheres of
hydrogen and ammonia gas. In the same way Drs
Slipher and Adel have proved that the faint bands of
Jupiter and Saturn are produced by methane or
natural gas.
* So this is Jupiter,' you say to the physicist in
charge, who probably wears a linen smock and looks
more like the alert foreman of a machine shop than
the picturesque juggler of worlds that you had im-
agined him to be.
* No, only its probable atmosphere,' is his reply.
* Nobody ever saw Jupiter or Saturn. Only its clouds.'
Such work does much to dispel the notion that
Jupiter is still red-hot after a separation from the sun
that occurred perhaps 5,000,000,000 years ago. Red
heat implies a temperature so high that ammonia and
methane would be decomposed. Their bands and lines
would not appear in the rainbows that have been
studied.
50 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
So, two new worlds arc visualized. They have cores
like the earth's heavy, dense, solid lumps of nickel-
iron. Outside is a thick layer of ice under high pres-
sure; above that a highly compressed atmosphere with
much hydrogen and ammonia and methane. Why the
high pressure? Because of the known masses of the
two planets. The clutch of gravitation upon them is
more powerful than upon the earth. On Jupiter a man
would find it difficult to lift his arm because of its
weight. The earth lost most of its hydrogen long ago
because of its small mass. Jupiter and Saturn retain
their allotments because of their greater mass.
We need measurements of temperature to piece out
the story. Drs Pettit and Nicholson of Mount Wilson
supply them. The two direct on the planets a sensitive
thermo-couple of their own invention. It is one of the
most delicate devices at the disposal of the modern
physicist so sensitive that it can measure a rise or fall
of three hundred-thousandths of a degree. And how
simple ! The heat of a star billions of miles away falls
on infinitesimal strips of bismuth and tin alloy. A
feeble current is set up. By measuring the current the
temperature is determined. The operative portion of
the instrument weighs less than a pinhead.
What are the findings of Pettit and Nicholson?
Cold, bitter cold. Minus 220 degrees Fahrenheit for
Jupiter and minus 280 for Saturn. The cold is so
intense that ammonia freezes solid. Dunham, Slipher,
and Wildt independently reach the conclusion that
the two great planets are wrapped in clouds of am-
LIFE IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM 5!
monia crystals. So thick are the clouds that it is im-
possible to see deep down to the surface, where the
methane must be particularly rich. Light a match on
that surface, whatever it may be, and the atmosphere
would catch fire become a roaring furnace if there
were any oxygen. In fact, there would be an explosion,
an instantaneous chemical combination that would
yield carbon dioxide and water.
The ammonia clouds scud over the surfaces of the
two planets and thus testify to terrific hurricanes
travelling at 400 to 600 miles an hour on Saturn and
at least 250 on Jupiter. Why these terrific blasts? No
one knows. Our own winds are the result of the sun's
heat. But at the distance of Jupiter and Saturn the sun
is so remote that it can hardly warm chilly hydrogen
and solid ammonia crystals. Here we have the chief
argument of those who still believe that Jupiter and
Saturn are red-hot.
The same method of spectroscopic analysis and the
same reliance on artificial atmospheres in tubes in the
hands of Drs Adams and Dunham have made it clear
*hat the air of Venus is composed largely of carbon
dioxide the gas which froths in beer and bubbles in
ginger-ale and which is as necessary for the support of
terrestrial life as oxygen. Through some mysterious
alchemy, of which we know hardly the rudiments,
light acting upon the carbon dioxide of our atmosphere
produces green plants, and with them starches and
sugars. Given green vegetation, it follows that there
52 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
must be water and the necessary mineral salts to
support it, with oxygen as an exhaled by-product.
And plants in their turn suggest the great drama of
evolution.
We turn to Mars. Not so long ago physicists differed
about its temperature. Dr Coblentz of the Bureau of
Standards settled all doubts with the aid of a marvel-
lously sensitive thermo-couple only one two-hundredths
of an inch in diameter. With that instrument he
measured the heat received not from the planet as a
whole but from particular regions. For the South Pole
in summer 15 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit were the read-
ings; for the South Temperate Zone at the same
season, 65 to 75 degrees; for the tropics at noon, 65
to 85 degrees; for the North Temperate Zone in
winter, 30 to 60 degrees. The planet proved to be
warmer than the sceptics contended. Probably the
Martian equator is bitter cold at night, but no colder
than New York at its wintry worst.
But what of the Martian atmosphere? Water
vapour and oxygen are there both prerequisites of
life. Astronomical doubters once believed that the
Martian white polar caps were not snow but solidified
carbon dioxide. Now it is certain that the caps are
snow or hoarfrost that melts in the spring and summer
and inevitably gives rise to water vapour. Dr Wright
has photographed Mars at Mount Wilson with light
of different colours and discovered yellow, watery
clouds floating at a height of 15,000 feet.
On the other hand, Prof Henry Norris Russell of
LIFE IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM 53
Princeton thinks that the red areas of Mars may be
otherwise interpreted. He bids us consider the oxygen
that the earth carried with it from the sun when the
great creative catastrophe occurred. Half of the orig-
inal amount is gone. We see it everywhere in the
form of iron ore (mere rust), iron-bearing red clays,
and red sandstone. Iron combines avidly with oxygen.
Ultimately all our oxygen will be thus chemically
removed from the atmosphere. If man is not to die
gasping for breath he will have to liberate oxygen
some day from the ores, clays, and rocks in which it
is being imprisoned. Prof Russell sees in Martian red
deserts deposits of rusty ore. Nevertheless, vines may
crawl over the ground, and even the kind of vegeta-
tion which Dr Coblentz suggests may flourish on
Mars may conceal the rust in the warmer season.
With all this evidence there is little doubt that Mars
can support some simple form of life. The planet is a
spent world, drying up and slowly dying of senility.
The dark-green areas that spread in summer and turn
an ochreous red in autumn are probably areas of
vegetation. But of what kind? No one knows. Cob-
lentz thinks it may be accounted for ' by the presence
of tuft-forming grasses such as grow on high prairies,
the tussock grasses of Peru and Patagonia, and
especially the mosses and lichens which grow in Arctic
regions.'
When we turn to the other planets we face
enigmas. Mercury is so near the sun that lead would
54 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
melt on its surface and water flash into steam. Uranus
and Pluto are so far off that the sun must appear like
a brilliant star. Days that are no brighter than our
late twilight, seasons measured by years, cold that is
as intense as that which prevails on Jupiter and Saturn
conjure up a vision of terrifying barrenness.
So it seems as if only the earth is capable of sup-
porting the higher forms of life the one freakish
world in a freakish solar system. The astronomer who
yawns whenever he reads anything that deals with
the possibility of life on other planets rejoices in these
facts. * A minor crustal phenomenon at the surface of
a planet,' Shapley calls life. To Jeans it may be ' a
mere accidental and possibly quite unimportant by-
product of natural processes, which have some other
and more stupendous end in view.' Human beings,
anthropoid apes, birds, lower animals, bacteria they
play no part in astrophysics.
If the canals of Mars are to be interpreted as en-
gineering works, the door is opened wide for specula-
tion. The polar caps, though obviously natural
phenomena, might be regarded as artificial by
romanticists. Since it would not always be possible to
distinguish between the works of nature and of in-
telligent beings, the relentlessness of present reasoning
vanishes. Hence the perfect satisfaction with which
the watchers of the skies turn from Mars the only
planet besides the earth that can be considered as the
abode of a low form of life to Jupiter and Saturn
with their clouds of stifling ammonia and their
LIFE IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM 55
tornadoes of inflammable methane, to broiling Mer-
cury, and to the bitter cold of Uranus, Neptune, and
Pluto. Life as we know it never had a chance on them.
But that observation of Eddington's about the freak-
ishness of the solar system sticks in the mind. Can it
be that nature creates a thousand million stars and
causes them to radiate their substance away in order
to produce a cinder or two with just the right relation
to a central sun, with just the right atmosphere and
chemical conditions for the support of life ? Have we
here justification for man's conceit his deep convic-
tion that he is the very king-pin of the universe?
V. Rocketing through Space
IT WAS THE NOVELIST J.-H. ROSNY, AINE, WHO COINED THE
word 'astronautics'. The sum of 5000 francs is annu-
ally awarded by the Societe Astronomique de France
on behalf of its donors, Robert Esnault-Pelterie and
Andre Hirsch, for the most meritorious original con-
tribution to the advancement of astronautics. The
prize has been won by Frenchmen, Germans, and
Americans. Astronautics! The science and art of
voyaging from star to star. How utterly puerile and
inconsequential seem the transatlantic flights of our
boldest aviators compared with the stirring implica-
tions of that single word !
To leave the earth and rush through space with
velocities never before achieved by man; to see with
one's own eyes the features of that other face of the
moon which is for ever turned away from the earth;
to settle once and for all by personal inspection the
real nature of those mysterious 'canals' of Mars which
Lowell thought were irrigation-ditches dug on a
planetary scale by a race of intelligent beings strug-
gling to stave off extinction by husbanding the water
of the melting polar snows; to pierce the veil of
Venus, impenetrable to earthly telescopes, and to dis-
cover what lies behind it surely the technical imagin-
ation is capable of no more magnificent flight.
A recital of past 'impossibilities', which, somehow,
have come to pass, does not prove that men can leave
the earth and voyage through the solar system. It be-
comes necessary to examine the obstacles that the astro-
naut must surmount, to design a mechanism which
57
58 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
may be regarded as an artificial meteor, controlled in
its flight and inhabited by passengers, and to forecast
the responses of the human organism to an environ-
ment in which the word 'weight' ceases to have any
meaning.
What is it that prevents us from voyaging to the
moon and the more distant planets? Primarily the
earth's gravitation manifested by weight. To escape
into space we must overcome our weight and the
weight of our vehicle overwhelm one force with
another.
Every boy who has ever pitched a baseball has ac-
quired an elementary knowledge of the earth's power.
He throws the ball up into the air. It takes a measur-
able time to return, and during part of that time it
actually defies gravitation. He throws it again this
time with more force than before and therefore still
higher. It takes longer to return. Thus the fact is
driven home that the more force with which the ball is
hurled the higher it will fly and the longer it will take
to return. Clearly, if there were a pitching machine
powerful enough it would be theoretically possible to
throw a ball any distance even to the moon.
This naturallv leads to a calculation of the force
*
required to overcome gravitation so that a projectile
would never return to the earth. By applying New-
ton's law of gravitational attraction it develops that a
body must have a velocity of about seven miles a
second to escape the pull of the earth. Seven miles a
second! And the fastest bullet has a muzzle-velocity
ROCKETING THROUGH SPACE 59
of less that 3000 feet a second ! Undaunted by the dis-
couragingly small amount of energy that can be re-
leased by igniting an explosive powder, Jules Verne
nevertheless shoots men into space in his novel From
the Earth to the Moon, shoots them in a luxuriously
furnished shell from a colossal cannon buried in the
earth. Verne evidently had the assistance of an expert
in ballistics in imparting to his tale all the illusion
of scientific reality that accompanies the presentation
of easily grasped mathematical calculations. When
voyages into the cosmos began to be discussed by
abler men than Verne, it was discovered that for all
their plausibility his cannon and his enormous charge
of powder were much too feeble. Indeed, it may be
doubted whether his projectile, half villa and half
shell, would ever have left the cannon at all. The
truth is that with no powder known and with no
cannon that can be constructed can man convey him-
self across the awful chasm that separates him even
from the neighbourly moon.
And so we turn to other vehicles than colossal shells.
Airplanes? They must be dismissed at once. Inter-
planetary space is airless, and air is as necessary to a
flying machine as water to a transatlantic liner. The
whole machine is supported by air, the engine must
breathe oxygen like a human being, and the propeller
must screw its way through air. Zeppelins? They
must be discarded for similar reasons. We need an
engine that can propel itself in a vacuum. Only the
rocket meets the condition, for the rocket is propelled
60 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
merely by the back-pressure of the burning gases that
stream rearward from it at high velocity.
Just why the rocket should be thus propelled is not
difficult to understand. One of Newton's laws of
motion tells us that action and reaction are equal and
opposite in direction. A stone wall pushes you as hard
as you push it. Fire a shotgun and your shoulder feels
the recoil. What drives the rocket is recoil. A rocket
literally kicks itself on its way, whether or not that
way is filled with air. An engineer classes a rocket as a
reaction engine, and the physicist accepts it as the only
type that can possibly conquer the abyss that separates
planet from planet.
It might be supposed from an uncritical reading of
the newspapers that only in our day has the rocket
been considered as a means of interplanetary com-
munication. Jules Verne admitted that he had been
inspired by no less a person than Cyrano de Bergerac,
who once wrote a tale of an escape from New Canada
in a vessel which was driven by rockets to the moon.
Newton naturally pointed out the possibilities of
journeying through space on the rocket principle as
a corollary of his action-and-reaction law. Achille
Eyraud, an obscure contemporary of Verne's, pro-
posed the use of a rocket for the exploration of space,
and this in 1865, the very year in which From the
Earth to the Moon appeared. In our own generation
at least a score of novelists have voyaged in imagina-
tion from planet to planet in rockets. What is more
to the point, a whole school of physicists and engineers
ROCKETING THROUGH SPACE 6 1
has busied itself with astronautics, with the result that
a formidable, highly mathematical literature has accu-
mulated which considers the rocket under all conceiv-
able conditions, from the moment it leaves the earth
in a deafening roar to the moment when it drifts
through space a mere speck in the solar system and yet
part of it.
Scientific study of the rocket's cosmic possibilities
begins in 1881 with Hermann Ganswindt, whose un-
fortunate name only added to the ridicule that his
studies brought upon him. Now we have Franz von
HoefTt, Prof K. E. Ziolkowsky, Dr G. Tichoff, Prof
Herman Oberth, Franz A. Ulinski, Dr Walter Hoh-
mann, Prof R. H. Goddard, Andre Bing, Robert
Esnault-Pelterie, and others. It would be idle to pre-
tend that the mathematical and experimental re-
searches of these men are all of equal merit. On the
other hand the monographs of Oberth, Hohmann,
Goddard, Esnault-Pelterie and Valier have certainly
lifted the interplanetary rocket ship out of the limbo
of such lunacies as the perpetual-motion machine and
squaring the circle. Indeed, von Opel's startling exhibi-
tion of a rocket automobile's speed on the Avru's race-
track near Berlin in 1928 did much to gain respect for
his friend Valier's bold imaginary wanderings through
the solar system. Books on rocket ships are popular in
Germany. Oberth's prize-winning Wege zur Raum-
schiffahrt has passed through several editions. A whole
periodical, Die R.a\ete y is devoted to the publication of
recondite articles on the construction of ships that kick
62 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
themselves from star to star and on the physics, physio-
logy, and psychology of cosmic voyages. There is or
was a Reichsdeiitscher Verein fur Raumschiffahrt in
Breslau. Another in Vienna, organized by von Hoefft,
is extinct. There was even a First International Ex-
position for Space Navigation organized in 1927 by
Prof Fedrow.
Although he was not the first in the field, it was un-
doubtedly Prof R. H. Goddard of Clark University,
Worcester, Massachusetts, who gave the thoughts and
plans of astronauts purpose and direction. His primary
object is to explore the upper reaches of the atmo-
sphere with the aid of instruments which are virtually
artificial sense-organs and which automatically write
down their impressions of temperature, humidity,
wind-velocity, electrical discharges, and the intensity
of sunlight. His calculations show that it is possible
to convey a pound of magnesium-flash powder to the
surface of the moon and to watch its explosion from
the earth through a telescope. Unlike most of those
who preceded and followed him, he has conducted
experiments which have given the whole cause of
astronautics an enormous intellectual impulse because
they show how the rocket's efficiency as a reaction
engine may be greatly increased. By properly shaping
the nozzle of a rocket Goddard succeeded in attaining
a speed of 8000 feet a second with a commercial
smokeless powder. More recent experiments indicate
that 12,000 feet a second is now possible. Contrast this
with the 2500 feet a second with which a bullet leaves
ROCKETING THROUGH SPACE 63
the muzzle of a rifle and it is evident that Goddard's
rockets are probably the fastest projectiles ever built
by man. Incidentally, an efficiency of 64 per cent, was
obtained, which is more than twice as high as that of
the best Diesel engine.
A rocket is accelerated as it rushes on partly because
it loses weight as its propellant is dissipated. It is the
final velocity that gives the physicist pause. Prof God-
dard has calculated that to deposit a kilogram (2-2
pounds) of flash powder oh the moon at least 600 kilo-
grams of propellant are required. Hence he reached the
conclusion that useless chambers must be automatic-
ally discarded to save weight. The amount of the
propellant required is thus brought within reason.
Nearly all astronauts therefore design their rocket
ships so that sections that have served their purpose
are shed. Some physicists also recommend that the
propellant be fired in cartridges, one by one, on the
machine-gun principle, the empty cartridges being
automatically ejected.
But 8000 or even 12,000 feet a second is not enough
for aerial navigation. We must seek propellants far
more powerful than nitrocellulose compounds. God-
dard, Oberth, and others agree that an explosive gas
composed of oxygen and hydrogen contains the requi-
site energy. This complicates the problem inasmuch as
pumps must be provided and alloys must be devised
which will not become brittle in contact with intensely
cold liquid gases. Both Goddard and Oberth have
experimented with propellants of this nature. It has
64 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
been found that 43-5 pounds of such a mixture can
send a pound of weight out of the earth's gravitational
influence. The exact composition of these propellants
is not known. Oberth has experimented with a mix-
ture of oxygen and an inflammable gas or liquid such
as hydrogen, gasolene, alcohol, and street gas. With
correctly designed nozzles and some means of casting
off useless load, both Goddard and Oberth believe it
possible to reach the moon and even Mars. The late
Max Valier was convinced that no propellant known
to man can drive a rocket beyond the moon. Robert
Esnault-Pelterie, a brilliant engineer with a vast ex-
perience as a designer of airplanes behind him, believes
that only atomic energy will enable an astronaut to
visit another planet and return to the earth. Goddard
has shown what can be accomplished with correctly
designed nozzles, and Oberth has been especially
ingenious in reducing loads. It is significant that these
two physicists are convinced that some combination of
oxygen and hydrogen is sufficient for the astronaut's
purpose.
It must not be supposed that the astronauts are all
for building a space-ship as huge as an ocean liner
without preliminary experimenting. Following Prof
Goddard's example they advocate the construction of
small, unmanned rockets which can be sent to heights
not yet reached by kites and sounding balloons. The
next step is to hit the moon and explode a pound or
two of magnesium-flash powder in accordance with
Prof Goddard's plan. What follows then is a matter
ROCKETING THROUGH SPACE 65
of dispute. Some would build a craft which would be
a hybrid airplane and rocket and with which long-
distance experimental flights in the earth's atmosphere
could be made. A flight from Berlin to New York
would occupy less than a forenoon. Oberth, on the
other hand, is convinced that the high-speed rocket
can never be combined with the airplane. By progres-
sive steps he would arrive at a rocket which would
be used for experiment a rocket which would attain
a height of perhaps 350 miles and in which a voyage
around the earth at the rate of 24,000 miles an hour
would become a pleasant excursion between breakfast
and luncheon.
In order to reduce the charge of propellant to
practical limits and facilitate a return to the earth,
Oberth has boldly suggested that the moon be used
as a kind of filling-station by rocket ships bound for
Mars and Venus. After refuelling, a new start can be
made with a velocity of less than two miles a second,
because of the lesser attraction of the moon. Inasmuch
as the moon is airless and its surface is blisteringly hot
for one half of the month and at nearly absolute zero
for the other half, its utilization as a filling-station is
a technical feat of no mean order. But the astronauts
think of everything. Suits are to be worn which can
be inflated with compressed air supplied from tank-
knapsacks. Huge reservoirs for propellants and store-
houses for provisions are to be erected, and this very
easily because tons can be handled on the moon as
efficiently as pounds on the earth. The astronauts even
E
66 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
suggest that artificial satellites be created which can
be made to revolve around the earth and Venus at
predetermined distances. These satellites, they declare,
can be constructed in fifteen or twenty years and will
facilitate studies for ever impossible with terrestrial
telescopes. The asteroids between Mars and Jupiter
become so many natural way-stations on journeys to
Jupiter.
Although it is intended to reach the moon in just
about the time that it takes a fast liner to steam from
New York to Southampton, a rocket is no more com-
plicated than a ship. Indeed, the reaction motors (mere
chambers from which gas is ejected at high velocity)
are much simpler than the turbines of a ship. It is
not especially difficult to construct a rocket weighing
300 to 1000 tons in sections which are dropped one
by one after their usefulness is over. Stability is the
first essential. This means that the rocket must not
tumble. To keep its pointed head in the line of flight
gyroscopes must be installed small, rapidly spinning
flywheels which resist any force that tends to disturb
their plane of rotation. Rudders are useless in a
vacuum. Side-nozzles may therefore be provided
through which gases may be made to stream when the
course is to be changed, although gyroscopes give
better control.
How can the captain of a rocket ship chart his
course? The position and apparent size of the earth
will tell him all he need know. He must be able to
measure its diameter accurately. If the earth appears
ROCKETING THROUGH SPACE 67
too large or too small at a given instant the starting
velocity was correspondingly too low or too high.
Should the earth be angularly situated too far this way
?r that way relative to two stars, the ship is or! the
:ourse by a measurable arc.
Let it not be supposed that if the space-ship were as
highly developed as the airplane now is, a jaded mil-
lionaire has only to say : * I'm off for Mars tomorrow,'
and dart off into the vast universe as casually as he flies
For Bermuda. When the ship shall leave is determined
not so much by the astronautical company that owns
her as by the positions of the planets. And she leaves
not within the hour or minute but precisely on the
second. Time-tables are compiled by astronomers.
Mars and the earth must be relatively near each other
if fuel is to be saved and the length of the outward
and inward voyages is not to be measured by years.
If a rocket ship can travel seven miles a second, and
Mars in opposition is only 36,000,000 miles distant,
why should a voyage out and back last more than a
few weeks ? Because we follow not a straight line but
the courses prescribed by the planets themselves. Jules
Verne estimates correctly that it will take 97 hours, 13
minutes, and 27 seconds to reach the moon if the
initial velocity is 12,000 yards a second. Hitting the
moon is somewhat like hitting a bird on the wing.
The marksman must aim ahead of his target so that
it will meet the bullet in just the calculated instant.
But there is no reliance on instinct when we deal with
260,000 miles in the case of the moon and 36,000,000
68 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
with Mars at its nearest. Only a good mathematician
can determine when the rocket should start and what
direction it should take. He must allow for the earth's
motion and its rotation around its axis and for the
motion of his planetary target. Mars must be met, as
it were, by appointment at a definite point in the
universe.
Nothing travels in a straight line in the cosmos. Of
necessity our rocket ship follows a curve. The astro-
nauts have decided that it were best for it to follow
some elliptical orbit of its own for a given period. In
a word, its motors are stopped at the proper time and
it becomes an artificial planet, a member of the solar
system which revolves around the sun in a definite
period. When Mars looms up in its own orbit, the
rocket motors are started again and the ship heads for
its destination.
It is no easy matter to select the ellipse that brings
the space-ship nearest Mars in the shortest time. All
the principles of celestial mechanics must be applied.
Allowances must also be made for variations in the
speed and in changes of direction of the ship. The
nozzle-velocity of the escaping gases must be known.
Hohmann and Valier have tabulated all the ellipses
that can possibly be considered by astronauts of the
future. You consult the table and find that Mars can
be most economically reached by entering an ellipse
which should carry the ship around the sun in some-
what less than two years or, more accurately, in 531
days. The outward voyage will usually take 260 1 / 2 days
ROCKETING THROUGH SPACE 69
if the ellipse pursued touches the orbits of both Mars
and the earth. Only one half the ellipse need be de-
scribed to reach the planet. Ellipses might be selected
which would shorten the journey to 171 days, but the
cost in energy would probably be greater than the
astronautical company would care to pay.
Man is a creature who has adapted himself to a
peculiar environment. If he is to survive in interstellar
space or in deep water, he must carry an artificial
duplicate of that environment with him. Because the
submarine engineers have already solved his problem
for him it will not be difficult for the astronaut to
supply passengers and crew with air and to dispose of
exhalations.
But air is not enough. The cabins must be heated.
Let a rocket travel from the earth to Mars and that
side which is turned to the sun becomes scorchingly
hot while the other side is at nearly absolute zero.
Oberth lines the sunny side of his rocket with black
pap&for silk, which absorbs the heat and re-radiates it
within the cabins. He has also thought of concentrat-
ing the sun's rays with concave mirrors if ordinary
absorption and re-radiation are insufficient. Other
physicists would construct the rocket on the vacuum-
bottle principle. The exhausted space between the
double walls would neither absorb nor radiate much
heat, so that some artificial heat would be necessary
for warmth.
It will be more difficult to guard against the violence
of the start. When an automobile lurches forward, you
70 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
feel yourself suddenly pressed against the back of your
seat. In a rocket the sensation continues because the
speed increases steadily. Not mere speed but accelera-
tion is dangerous. The space-ship starts from a state
of rest and in eight minutes is rushing along at the
rate of seven miles a second, assuming that the ac-
celeration is 25 metres the first second, 50 the next,
75 the third, and so on. Acceleration manifests itself
as pressure and an actual increase in weight so long
as it lasts. It is as if a titan weighing half a ton were
kneeling on your chest and flattening every square
inch of you. The loose silver in your pocket buries
itself in the flesh. Your chest barely manages to heave
as you gasp for air. Try to lift your arm. It takes an
effort so mighty that the perspiration trickles into
your eyes. You manage to remove from your waistcoat
pocket a gold pencil that presses painfully against you.
Because your grasp is none too firm the pencil is torn
from you and flung against the bulkhead behind you.
Even the most optimistic astronauts concede that the
physiological effect of rapid acceleration is a danger
with which they must reckon. Oberth believes that
internal injuries may be sustained and that normal
nervous reactions may be interrupted. The fluid in the
spinal column will certainly be affected and likewise
the liquid in the labyrinth of the middle ear that
spirit-level which governs our sense of equilibrium.
On the other hand it may be argued that no one knows
what forces the human organism can withstand. Pilots
in looping airplanes survive centrifugal forces that
ROCKETING THROUGH SPACE 7!
ought to tear their arms and legs from their sockets
and their heads from their shoulders, and acrobats
drop into nets under accelerations that spell certain
injury on paper. The more cautious astronauts would
conduct experiments with monkeys to measure the
forces to which the body can safely be subjected.
It is evident that during the first terrible moments of
a flight to another world you do not sit at your ease.
In fact you do not sit at all. You are slung in a heavily
cushioned hammock; for only in a horizontal position
can you possibly withstand the agonizing pressure of
acceleration. Woe to him who is on his feet when the
ship lurches forward. He is hurled against the stern
bulkhead of his compartment, flattened out, perhaps
killed. All the astronauts advocate the lowest possible
starting speeds. Oberth first burns a mixture of alcohol
and oxygen and in a minute passes to oxygen and
hydrogen. It is questionable whether it will ever be
possible to overcome an objection which is inherent
in the very principle of the rocket.
When the ship is out of the gravitational influence
of the earth, by which we mean that it cannot fall
back, you must adjust yourself to an entirely new set
of physical circumstances. If but a moment before you
were tortured by high pressure, you are now struck
with terror because you feel no pressure at all. You
weigh nothing, because the earth is too far away to
attract you sensibly, although its influence theoretically
never ceases. You clutch your hammock in despera-
tion. The ship seems to be falling. To be sure it is
72 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
: alling, but only in the sense that every planetary body
: alls as the moon, for example, constantly falls
owards the earth but is constrained to describe a
:losed curve in so doing.
The truth is that the ship is now a part of the solar
;ystem, a miniature world which requires no motor to
Irive it and which revolves around the sun in accord-
ince with the laws of solar gravitational attraction in a
lefinite year of its own. The officers appear to reassure
r ou. You unfasten yourself and step out. You find that
'ou can stand in mid-air. Nothing falls in a terrestrial
ense. Release your grip from the cup that is in your
land and it simply remains where it is. A match flung
iside travels on until it is stopped by a bulkhead, to
emain there. Chairs and tables are screwed down so
hat they may not assume strange positions when they
lave been accidentally tilted. Everywhere there are
opes and straps. You learn quickly enough that it is
>est to use them and progress hand over hand from
me spot to another. If the ship has magnetic floors you
vear steel-soled shoes, so that you may walk about in
i seemly earthly fashion. There is no need of a bed.
fou slip your arms and legs into straps and go to sleep.
Billows? They are useless, since your head has no
veight.
Voyage thus for two years and the muscles must
itrophy. The passenger who returns to earth finds it
lard to accustom himself to active work and normal
>ressures. Some of the astronauts, Oberth among
hem, have taken the trouble to devise cabins which
ROCKETING THROUGH SPACE 73
can be spun, so that the centrifugal force generated
will constitute a substitute for the gravitation or
weight-effect to which the human organism is accus-
tomed.
Eating and drinking become somewhat precarious.
Pouring wine out of a bottle is impossible. The wine
simply remains where it is. The glass must be broken
and removed like a cracked eggshell, so that the wine
may be served as a ball the shape which it assumes.
Or the bottle may be whirled around so that the wine
is driven out by centrifugal force. Even then it must
be served as a globular lump. Soup appears not in a
tureen but as a globe that floats in from the kitchen,
followed by meats and sauces. Each course must be
pursued by hungry passengers. When they swallow
they run the risk of committing suicide. Meat and
drink naturally gravitate into the intestinal tract, aided
by the peristaltic action of the stomach. In interstellar
space food is as apt to run down the windpipe as down
the gullet. To be drowned by a cup of tea is not an
impossibility on a rocket ship.
The astronauts apply the absence of any marked
terrestrial gravitational pull very practically. If you
are clad in a suit inflated with air at the right pressure
and equipped with an oxygen-tank, there is no reason
why you should not pass through an airlock and thus
into space. You do not fall away from the ship. You
cannot be left behind, for you move in your orbit at
precisely the same speed as the ship. You place your-
self relatively to the ship just as you would place a
74 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
chair relatively to a table in your library, knowing that
the positions are fixed. The recoil of a pistol-shot will
propel you to and from the ship, if you must move
about in space. We understand now why Oberth con-
structs his rocket so that the bow can be separated
from the body. After the fastenings are unscrewed, a
slight push is enough to drive the bow forward. A
long cable makes it possible to pull the bow back and
bolt it in place.
Clad in your air-filled suit you step out on an obser-
vation platform of the Oberth ship and look about
you. An overwhelming sense of loneliness. There is
nothing for the eye to 'lean' upon nothing but the
ship that seems woefully small, although it is as large
as a yacht. A new welkin is unfolded. There is no
night, no day. The motionless sun blazes relentlessly
in a brownish-black canopy a star that seems like a
gigantic ball of white-hot metal. You blot out the sun
with your hand. And around the sun appears the
weird, pearly corona seen on earth only during total
eclipses. Despite the glare of that fervid disk the stars
are visible everywhere. They shine with the hard,
steady cruel light of so many remote electric arcs. You
realize how much beauty the atmosphere imparts to
the earth that dust-and-moisture-laden atmosphere
which scatters the sun's rays and gives the sky its
azure hue and which causes the stars to twinkle. The
earth and the moon appear as a marvellously beauti-
ful double planet. A rim of red surrounds the earth,
and around the red rim is a fringe of blue both the
ROCKETING THROUGH SPACE 75
effect of transmitted and reflected sunlight on the
atmosphere. Over the poles flicker the auroras.
Through the clouds deep green jungles, yellow deserts,
and pale-green steppes can be glimpsed.
Left to itself the ship would revolve for ever in an
ellipse. The attraction of the sun and the planets keeps
it on its course. And so it drifts week after week until
calculations, which have been checked and re-checked,
convince the captain that he must force himself out of
his orbit. Mars will be at a certain place at a certain
time. So the captain starts the rocket motor again.
When he reaches Mars he does not plunge into its thin
atmosphere. The ship becomes a satellite of Mars and
revolves around it perhaps for weeks, or until the earth
has swung into a favourable position for the return.
Valier boldly considered the possibility of landing on
one of the two satellites of Mars and using it as a base
for exploration of the planet before the homeward
voyage began.
The return to the earth's surface is not without its
dangers. Elaborate braking devices have been devised.
Backfiring rockets are to retard the ship. The danger
of the rocket's melting by mere friction with the atmo-
sphere is very real. Meteors flare up in the sky at a
height of about sixty miles. Most of them are con-
sumed before they strike the earth burned up by
rubbing against the rough air. A rocket ship is an
artificial meteor. Why should it not be reduced to
drops of incandescent metal? Here we have another
reason for a low starting speed. The descent is especi-
76 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
ally perilous because of the high speed at which the
earth's atmosphere is encountered. Entering closed
gliders, the passengers coast down the air in vast spirals
to the earth. Parachutes, too, are provided. Nearly
all the astronauts see nothing for it but to abandon
the ship and let it dash itself to pieces.
According to Prof Moulton, 'more than 20,000,000
meteors strike the earth daily'. Other astronomers
place the number as high as a billion a day, including,
of course, even masses as small as peas. But the energy!
What if 10,000 meteorites, fine as dust, could be held
in the hand, according to the estimates of Drs F. A.
Lindemann and G. M. B. Dobson? In its brief flight
each gives up energy enough to make 100,000 ordinary
incandescent lamps glow.
The average height of 106 meteors that streaked
across the sky while W. F. Denning, a well-known
British authority, observed them was 73-6 miles. These
106 meteors darted into and out of sight at an average
speed of 26-9 miles a second, but speeds as high as 62
miles a second have been observed. A grain of sand
endowed with so much energy can kill. Luckily for
us, nearly all meteors are burned up in the atmosphere
by mere friction.
Obviously the scientific invader of interstellar space,
hurled along by the reaction of a highly concentrated
fuel, must be prepared to encounter hundreds, per-
haps thousands of meteors. He cannot avoid them
even if he sees them. What is his speed compared with
theirs of more than 100,000 miles an hour? His rocket
ROCKETING THROUGH SPACE 77
craft may be pierced through and through by some-
thing no larger than a grain of sand.
The consequences of the rocket ship's advent end
not with the mere exploration of the nearer regions of
the solar system. Over and over again the astrophysi-
cists have assured us that the earth must ultimately
be reduced to a cold cinder swimming around the sun.
The atmosphere will disappear. Oceans and lakes will
dry up. What is the destiny of the human race ? Must
the last man die of starvation and thirst? Possibly the
rocket ship is man's last hope. By the time the earth
has become senile and unlivable, Venus will be ripe
for intelligent beings. So it may happen, aeons hence,
that Venus may be colonized by the earth as America
was once colonized by Europe. And the earth will
wheel around its orbit, an abandoned, planetary wreck
of its former luxuriant green self.
VI. Explorers of the Atmosphere
A MILLION YEARS AGO, WHEN MAN WAS STILL HALF APE,
he looked about him and wondered. Those twinkling
lights in the dark sky at night what are they ? That
huge ball of fire that rises high in the heavens, only to
sink again at evening what is it? Whence does it
come? Whither does it go? These trees, this hard
ground beneath the feet how far dp they extend?
For all our telescopes and spectroscopes, our obser-
vatories and laboratories, our mathematical accom-
plishments and cosmic theories, we are much like that
primitive savage, distinguished from the brutes below
by his ability to ask questions. With him science began.
For science is concerned entirely with asking questions
about man and his environment the right kind of
questions and finding the answers.
Among the earliest of these questioners who belong
to our species of humanity were the explorers, the
strong-framed savages, and the Vikings who boldly
pushed out towards the setting sun on unknown seas
or picked their way through equally unknown forests.
They are commonly regarded as adventurers thirsting
for excitement. They were also scientists. Consciously
or unconsciously they were trying to answer questions.
Where am I ? How far can I travel on foot or in my
boat? What is out there where earth and sky meet?
Columbus, da Gama, Magellan, van Diemen, Cap-
tain Cook, Peary, Amundsen, Scott, Shackleton, Byrd
all are lineal descendants of the primitives who
roamed and who fought with wild beasts and braved
privation and disease to find out more and more about
79
8() SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
this earth. Magellan's circumnavigation of the glob<
was a colossal scientific experiment. It proved experi
mentally the correctness of the theory that the eartl
is a round ball.
For centuries man has been thus crawling over land
and sea like some intelligent insect. At last he ha;
learned the more important facts about the planet or
which he lives. He knows its general shape and size.
He is like a stranger in a house once mysterious be-
cause it was unknown. It is possible for him to draw
floor plans what he calls charts and maps and by
their means to find his way about.
And yet this is but a beginning. There is more to the
earth than land and sea, mountain and desert. Prob-
ably it never struck Columbus that the air we breathe
is part of the earth, something to be explored like the
more tangible ocean. He accepted it merely as a neces-
sity of life. It is only in our own time, by which we
mean the last century or so, that the wistful gaze of the
explorer has turned upward to the clouds. The balloon
and the airplane have given him new powers. No
longer is he a two-dimensional adventurer poking into
this valley or groping in that unthreaded forest, clam-
bering up naked, snow-capped peaks or creeping over
blazing, yellow sands. A three-dimensional scientist
now, he must rise into the air to answer new questions
about the earth. How far does the atmosphere extend ?
What is its relation to clouds, auroras, lightning,
meteors, and for that matter to land and water, to
green leaf and to man himself? A million years of
EXPLORERS OF THE ATMOSPHERE 8l
questioning has at last given him a cosmic outlook.
One fact at least the early balloonists, first explorers
in three dimensions, succeeded in establishing : there
is a limit to the extent of the atmosphere. Men gasp
and die if they ascend high enough. Yet far above the
dying altitude, as it may be called, there is still an
ocean of air. For all we know, the atmosphere may
reach outwardly from the earth hundreds of miles, but
without the aid of oxygen a man cannot breathe much
above six. Even with oxygen it is doubtful for tech-
nical reasons if he can attain more than fifteen in a
balloon.
Suppose that Columbus had been in a similar pre-
dicament in 1492, that he could not venture more than
a mile or two from the shore without perishing, that
he had reason to believe that there was land beyond
the ocean in the west. Thirsting for answers to his
questions, imagine him resorting to automatic devices.
He invents a little ship without a soul aboard which
sails off to the west. It is packed with mechanism,
almost as human as Columbus himself. The automatic
instruments write down the physical facts about the
voyage the storms that arc encountered and above
all the unknown obstacle (land) beyond which it could
not go and its distance from Spain. Spontaneously the
vessel turns round and sails back. Columbus reads the
records made by the instruments and infers what he
can about a country to the west.
It is by a similar method that the modern Colum-
buses of the atmosphere, the earth's invisible rind,
F
82 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
must conduct some of their explorations.
Before 1896 it was supposed that with increasing
altitude the air grows thinner and thinner and colder
and colder. All this was true, but it was only a fraction
of the truth.
Systematic exploration by Teisserenc de Bort dis-
pelled this conception of a one-piece atmosphere. That
assiduous French meteorologist, from 1896 on, sent up
free, unmanned sounding balloons freighted with
automatic instruments which wrote down what they
felt temperature, pressure, and other facts of interest
to scientists. At first he could hardly believe the scripts
that were recovered. They told a story as. astonishing
as any that Marco Polo brought back from the empire
of Genghis Khan or Columbus from the land that lay
across the ocean to the west.
More than six miles high, said the scripts, lies a
strange layer of air, a layer as different from the air
we live in as the Arctic is from Yucatan. There are no
clouds, no storms, nothing that we designate by the
word 'weather'. One day is like another. Never is the
air thickened even by a mist. The sun and the stars
blaze in a black sky. There reign eternal silence,
serenity, and cold cold that goes down to minus 70
degrees Fahrenheit.
De Bort and the meteorologists of his day spoke of
the 'isothermal' or 'uniform temperature' layer. Later
he coined the word 'stratosphere', and designated by
'troposphere' the dense stratum of air which hugs the
earth's surface and which we breathe. Although tropo-
EXPLORERS OF THE ATMOSPHERE 83
sphere and stratosphere are rather sharply separated,
their boundaries vary. Between them lies the tropo-
pause, a kind of no-man's land. The stratosphere is
lowest at the Poles (about six miles) and highest in the
tropics (ten miles).
A scientist on the moon armed with a sufficiently
penetrating telescope would probably be able to distin-
guish troposphere from stratosphere. To him the air
would appear as a bluish mist bulging at the earth's
equator. Deep down he would note a thick, disturbed
sediment. In these dregs, stirred by winds, life flour-
ishes, oceans wash continental shores, airplanes fly.
Luckily for us the sediment is a mechanical mixture of
water vapour, nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide,
with barely detectable quantities of helium, argon,
krypton, niton, xenon, and neon luckily, because
there are enough possible chemical combinations to
blow up the whole planet.
Even before Auguste Piccard made his first ascent,
men had attained the stratosphere. There were
Glaisher and Coxwell, who, on behalf of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science, rose on
September 5, 1862, swooned away, yet miraculously
returned after having attained a height which was
probably n kilometres, or 6-8 miles. And there were
Berson and Siiring, two Germans, who floated up to
10 -5 kilometres and, despite their oxygen masks, were
unconscious for at least a quarter of an hour.
In 1927 Captain Hawthorne Gray of the U.S. Army
Air Corps drifted off in an open basket to a height of
SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
eight miles, only to die on the way down as the result
of exposure to the thin air. Aviators have climbed into
the stratosphere time and time again, one of them
being Captain Albert W. Stevens, who participated
in the ascents to the stratosphere sponsored by the
National Geographic Society and the U.S. Army Air
Corps in 1934 and 1935. In October 1928 he soared
39,150 feet in an airplane over Dayton, Ohio.
It would be unfair to these adventurers to dismiss
them as mere athletes of aeronautics. Glaisher and
Coxwell, Berson and Suring, Stevens and his com-
panions, were certainly animated by purely scientific
motives. Yet it cannot be denied that all attempted
to break the height record.
The astonishing fact is that although balloonists of
the last century had actually entered the stratosphere
seventy and more years ago, they were not aware of the
strange new atmospheric world. Nothing but the cold
and the tenuity of the air struck them. The informa-
tion brought back by them and their immediate fol-
lowers at the risk of their lives was scarcely worth the
expenditure of time, effort, and money entailed. It
was the meteorologists on the ground with their six-
foot hydrogen balloons and instruments, mere auto-
mata, who discovered the stratosphere. In fact they
have thus plumbed the atmosphere to a height of about
twenty-one miles.
The concentrated attack on the stratosphere of late
years was brought about by the discovery and study of
the cosmic ravs, straneelv linked with radio-activitv.
EXPLORERS OF THE ATMOSPHERE 85
We go back to the early years of the century. Uranium,
thorium, radium, polonium, and other radio-active
elements were the marvels and puzzles of the day.
They gave off rays of various kinds. Many famous
springs turned out to be radio-active. From the earth's
rocks came energy that could tear away electrons from
atoms and thus ionize them make the air conduct
electricity as a wire does.
What could be more natural than to measure the
amount of this ionization or electrification? Prof
Theodore Wulff, a Jesuit priest, took some instru-
ments to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris and saw
that the effect was somewhat less there than on the
ground just what he expected. Still it seemed to
Wulff that the decrease was not so marked as it should
have been. Thereupon Prof Gockel, a Swiss physicist,
conceived the idea of going up in a balloon and
measuring the effect of radio-activity as he rose. In
1910 and 1911 he reached heights of about 13,000 feet
and came down more puzzled than when he went up.
The effect was indeed weaker at first, but to his
astonishment it grew stronger as he rose.
Struck by Gockel's results, Dr Victor F. Hess, later
crowned with the Nobel Prize for his work, did some
figuring which led him to conclude that the gamma
rays of radium, the most powerful agency supposedly
involved, ought to be absorbed entirely a few hundred
yards above sea-level. Either Gockel was wrong or
his observations were worth repeating. So Hess sent
up unmanned balloons with recording instruments.
86 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
Heights of 16,000 feet were reached. There was no
doubt about Gockel's findings. The rays were stronger
at great heights than near the earth.
Hess went up in balloons himself and later collabo-
rated with Prof Kolhorster in making measurements
at heights of nearly six miles. Always the same result.
The rays undoubtedly grew stronger with increasing
altitude. There was only one conclusion to be drawn.
These rays had nothing to do with radio-activity. They
came either from the earth's atmosphere or from
outer space. Moreover, they were of tremendous
energy. Even the gamma rays were not so penetrat-
ing. To Hess must go the credit of having recognized
the cosmic character of the rays.
In 1925 Prof Millikan decided to enter this strange
new field of exploration. He sent up unmanned bal-
loons from Kelly Field, Texas, struggled up moun-
tains in Bolivia, climbed Pike's Peak with 300 pounds
of lead and a tank of water, scaled Mount Whitney
in order to lower instruments into snow-fed Lake
Muir, journeyed to the Arctic regions to make more
observations there, and even rose as high as he could
in airplanes with ingenious devices of his own con-
struction. Not only did he confirm what his pre-
decessors had discovered but he published much more
accurate records.
Then came the great question : what are these
rays ? To Millikan the rays are simply waves of light,
but of a shortness, penetration and energy previously
unknown. They can pierce eighteen feet of lead. Even
EXPLORERS OF THE ATMOSPHERE 87
at the bottom of Lake Constance 775 feet they can
be detected. They are not observed directly as we
observe daylight. By their effects alone are they
known. They tear away electrons from air atoms.
The electrons in turn run amuck for a few moments
and wreck other atoms even their very cores. All
that the physicist sees is the fragments of wreckage.
Prof Arthur H. Compton was attracted by the
mystery. He organized and directed a world-wide
survey which eventually led him to the conclusion
already reached by Clay, Kolhorster, and others in
Europe that the rays are for the most part bits of
matter or particles. There can be no doubt that they
are stronger near the Poles than at the Equator,
which is exactly what is to be expected if they are
electrified particles. The earth is a huge magnet.
Theoretically it ought to draw such particles to its
poles.
We see, then, that mountain-climbing and balloon-
ing have always been a part of cosmic-ray research and
that the stratosphere is as important to the atomic
physicist as it is to the meteorologist. To the upper air
a scientist must of necessity go if he would run down
the cosmic rays to their origin. It must be confessed
that thus far the quest has not been successful. Prof
Regener, like many of his predecessors, has sent up
unmanned sounding balloons with instruments, to
discover if the rays continue to increase in strength
indefinitely. On one occasion his balloons attained a
height of 22 kilometres or 13*66 miles.
88 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
More ascents must be made to settle the question of
the origin of the cosmic rays. Besides, the stratosphere
turns out to be worth investigating on its own account.
Here is a region inundated by rays from which the
troposphere shields us ordinary sunlight, but of a
fierceness unknown to us; ultra-violet rays, infra-red
rays, cosmic rays, an endless stream of electrons from
the sun, and possibly other particles of which we are
not even aware. Farther out, at thirty-five miles,
beyond the range even of sounding balloons, there
seems to be an active ozone layer where the air is as
warm as at the earth's surface and where a man's shout
could be heard. Still farther out, at sixty or sixty-five
miles, there is an invisible electron mirror that reflects
wireless waves around the earth. And beyond that
still another.
We begin to see why physicists have suddenly
become expert, record-breaking balloonists. Height,
more height is their cry. Six miles is not enough.
Eight, ten, fifteen scarcely satisfy. To float up wearing
an oxygen mask and the furs of an Arctic explorer is
an insuperable handicap. The hands must be free.
A man must be able to move about if he is to accom-
plish his scientific mission. He must be kept warm
without clothing himself in an electrically heated suit
thicker than a bed-quilt.
State the problem thus and it becomes apparent why
Piccard decided to abandon the old, open balloon-
basket. He conceived the now familiar globular
gondola or car a hermetically sealed hollow ball of
EXPLORERS OF THE ATMOSPHERE
light metal in which two men can live in comfort
for a few hours, breathing oxygen as it escapes at a
measured rate from a steel flask, reading instruments,
looking out of port-holes now and then, noting
interesting phenomena in a log-book.
It must be said that when the world first heard of
this proposal it classified Piccard as a mild crank of
the inventor type. To be sure, he was a professor, but
he was not an outstanding figure in the world of
physicists. The pictures of him that were published
boded no good. That long, studious face, with the
spectacles, that intellectual brow, that bald head with
the fringe of unfashionably tousled hair might belong
to a tutor of the Second Empire, but not to an adven-
turer who could successfully rise to heights never
before attained by a human being.
But Piccard proved that a square jaw and a rugged,
athletic frame are the least important requisites of one
who dares the unknown in the atmosphere. An ob-
scure Belgian professor haunted by the mystery of the
cosmic rays, he made the one noteworthy advance in
free ballooning since hydrogen was introduced for the
inflation of gas-bags. Every ascent into the strato-
sphere by balloon since 1931 has followed the prin-
ciples that he laid down. He is the first of a new race
of explorers. What began with him solely as an effort
to obtain more information about the cosmic rays has
awakened such interest in the stratosphere that a new
era of discovery has been inaugurated, an era com-
parable with that which began with Columbus in 1492.
90 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
Soviet physicists were the first to take this larger
view and to rise into the stratosphere for something
more than the accumulation of facts about the cosmic
rays. They took up with them not only the usual
electrical devices that record the intensity of the cosmic
rays and the direction from which they come, but also
a battery of instruments which would enable science
to enlarge its knowledge of the upper atmosphere. A
larger balloon than theirs can lift more instruments,
bring back more facts, and possibly ascend even higher
into those upper reaches of the air which are already
known to harbour wonders as startling as any dis-
covered by the early navigators who pushed out into
unknown seas.
So under the auspices of the National Geographic
Society and the U.S. Army Air Corps two balloons,
Explorer I and Explorer //, were built in 1934 and
1935. The first of these came to grief on the descent
from 60,000 feet, but at about 18,000 feet Major Kep-
ner, Captain Stevens and Captain Anderson leaped
for their lives with parachutes.
The Explorer II was the largest balloon ever con-
structed. Its diameter was 192 feet, its capacity
3,700,000 cubic feet considerably more than five
times that in which Settle and Fordney rose and about
four times more than that in which the Russians
reached an altitude of nearly thirteen miles. So huge
was the Explorer II that an eleven-story building
could find room within the inflated gas-bag. A ton of
instruments could be carried. The gondola was, in
EXPLORERS OF THE ATMOSPHERE 9!
effect, a laboratory. In this huge bubble Captain (now
Major) Stevens and Captain Anderson rose to a height
of 72,395 feet above sea-level, a record altitude for a
manned balloon. The date was November n, 1935.
It is only with a whole battery of measuring devices
that the mystery of the stratosphere can be clarified.
The unmanned sounding balloon can do no more
than it has done in the hands of ground meteorologists.
Beyond the facts already cited height, intense cold-
ness, calm, slightly rising temperature with altitude
scarcely anything is known about the stratosphere.
For every fact there are ten hypotheses.
Take the matter of the composition of the air.
Theoretical calculations by the most eminent authori-
ties demanded an oxygen content of not more than
15 to 1 8 per cent, at twelve miles. But samples brought
down from that height varied not at all from samples
taken at sea-level. The amount of oxygen, in other
words, was 21 per cent. just what it is below. Now
the same eminent authorities are inclined to believe
that even at thirty miles the chemical composition of
the atmosphere is what we know it to be. Above that
level the ozone is suppo'sed to increase. At 100 miles
there ought to be noticeably more oxygen. But the
principal gas would always be nitrogen at any height.
Hydrogen and helium probably escape into outer space
because of their lightness.
Then there is the matter of wind. Ever since the
stratosphere was discovered by de Bort it has been
regarded as a region of dead calm. But gases so
92 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
thoroughly mixed at twelve miles that their chemical
composition is the same as on the earth below lend
colour to the view that there must be at least a light
breeze. Besides, the stratosphere is warmed by day
and cooled by night. Such a daily variation must give
rise to some wind on the principle of the draught
created by heated air rising in a chimney.
Is there, perhaps, a zephyr at the bottom of the
stratosphere and less and less motion of the air as the
top is approached? How true is it that the gases tend
to arrange themselves according to their weights above
the level of possible, gentle winds? The stratospheric
navigators must answer, if they can, though the
heights that can be attained in free balloons are
limited.
What is the colour of the sky ? It darkens, as Piccard
and the Russians saw. But the records we have are
good only for about thirteen miles. There can be no
doubt that as a balloon floats up the aspect of the
heavens changes. At 25,000 feet the welkin is a pallid
grey, at 35,000 dark blue, at 42,000 violet, at 60,000
black-violet-grey, at 68,000 a purplish, brownish, or
blackish grey. Such at least is the story told by the
skylight recorders that were found intact in the
Russian balloon after its fatal crash.
Strange phenomena are observed from the earth by
the curious eyes of physicists. At forty-five miles they
detect signs of a twilight, a scattering of light. But such
a dispersion cannot take place in a vacuum. So the
conclusion is drawn that the atmosphere extends to
EXPLORERS OF THE ATMOSPHERE 93
forty-five miles. But what is the nature of the air?
And then what are those wondrous clouds that
shimmer through the night in the northern sky? The
stratosphere is certainly cloudless. Yet at fifty miles
these mysterious reflections are plain enough. Meteoro-
logists go even so far as to call them 'noctilucent
clouds'. But clouds of what? Dust, perhaps? If so,
how does dust manage to gather in definite layers at
such an altitude? Whence did it come? From earthly
volcanoes? The physicist longs for a sample. But no
balloon is likely to bring it down not even an un-
manned balloon.
Far above the faery noctilucent clouds meteors flash
and auroras shimmer. The height must be at least
400 miles. Both phenomena imply an atmosphere. For
meteors burn up by mere friction with the air, and
auroras glow just like thin gases in a glass tube shot
through with an electric discharge. So even at 400
miles there must be air. But what kind of air? And
what makes the air glow? The sun no doubt furnishes
the electricity in the form of electrons. But what is
the mechanism?
Profs McLennan and Shrum of the University of
Toronto have hurled electrons through thin oxygen
and obtained a spectrum like that of the aurora, parti-
cularly a brilliant green line which has been observed
for years, to the great bewilderment of physicists. Does
it follow from this experiment in a laboratory that high
up where the aurora glows there is oxygen ?
And then there is Dr Joseph Kaplan of the Univer-
94 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
sity of California at Los Angeles, who has succeeded
in reproducing the complex spectrum of the fainter
lines and bands in the light of the night sky. Has he
hit on the mechanism that produces the effects we
see ? He uses a discharge-tube the neon sign on Main
Street is such a tube to bombard traces of nitrogen
and oxygen with electrons. The energy of the electrons
is absorbed by the nitrogen molecules and oxygen
atoms so long as the discharge is maintained. When
the barrage of electrons is stopped the molecules and
atoms radiate the absorbed energy in the form of light,
which is about the same as the light of the night sky.
It looks as if in the rarefied higher layers of the atmo-
sphere a steady stream of electrons coming from the
sun by day excites the nitrogen molecules and the
oxygen atoms, through an intermediate mechanism,
so that they glow faintly. Perhaps this is the best that
can be done by way of an explanation. Even an ascent
into the stratosphere to twenty miles is likely to help
the physicist.
VII. The Mystery of the Atom
WE TALK ABOUT ATOMS AS IF THEY WERE PRODUCTS OF
modern scientific thinking. But the ancients postulated
them centuries ago. In fact, the atom of Democritus,
the Greek, goes back to 400 B.C., and his was by no
means the first. Perhaps he seems especially important
because he gave us the word 'atom'. All matter is com-
posed of atoms, he reasoned. If iron, gold, and water
differ, it is because their atoms are different. The
Nobel prize-winners in physics cannot tell us very
much more. After 2500 years of thinking about matter
and experimenting with it, we have advanced only a
little beyond Democritus.
The obvious way of discovering how matter is con-
structed is to break it up or pick it into the smallest
possible pieces and to study these. But, what lies
beyond visibility? Scientists must always speculate
and theorize.
Atom-disintegration hardly describes what the
physicists are doing to matter. To be sure, their high-
^voltage machines and their electric guns and slingshots
strike terrific blows, break off bits, and even penetrate
to the very core of the atom. But disintegration im-
plies destruction beyond repair.
Usually the laboratory process of disintegrating is
accompanied by a process of creation. In other words,
the bullet that destroys, splits the core of an atom and
ejects fragments, is captured and used as a building
block for a new atom. So, in spite of the bombard-
ment, an atom o some kind always remains. Which
means that the physicist has not yet found a way of
95
96 SCIENCE T O D /LY AND TOMORROW
x **>'
entirely breaking up matter and probably never will.
Fundamentally we may never know much more than
Democritus knew about matter. But it is something
to discover how matter is transformed. The cosmos
becomes more dynamic becomes an evolving struc-
ture.
Even before there was atom-disintegration a few
physicists had wondered if the chemist's atom was
actually the type of fundamental brick of which the
cosmos was built. There are nearly a hundred different
atoms. Can the fundamentals of nature be so com-
plicated? Is it not more likely that they are very
simple?
Some shrewd guesses were made. One of the best
was that of William Prout, an astute physician and
physicist. In 1815 he decided that hydrogen was the
primordial stuff of the universe. An extraordinary
guess this; a fine approximation of our own views.
Success in atom-destruction and an approach to the
rock-bottom of th : universe came largely 'as the result
of accident. There was Sir William Crookes, a skilful,
imaginative chemist who experimented at length with
a glass tube from which he pumped as much air as he
could, and in the ends of which he sealed electrodes.
When he connected the electrodes with a source of
current the gap between them was bridged by a beauti-
ful glow. Crookes held an electromagnet near the tube.
He saw the glow bend towards the magnet, just as if it
were composed of iron particles. 'Cathode radiation'
the glow was called because it originated at the par-
THE MYSTERY OF THE ATOM 97
ticular electrode called the cathode.
Can this be light? Crookes asked. Whoever heard
of sunlight, candlelight, gaslight, any kind of light,
influenced by a magnet? He began to address scientific
groups on 4 a fourth state of matter'.
This mystery was cleared up by J. J. Thomson,
destined to become one of the greatest physicists of his
day. The glow was electric so much was sure. A few
daring minds had suggested that perhaps electricity
was composed of atoms just like matter. Thomson
;.adc some , easur^meius \\ uv, V.M. \ipvcd him tha
electricity has mass- a property supposed to be con
fined to matter. Then came a day when he could an
nounce that the cathode rays were particles of nega-
tive electricity smaller than atoms. In fact, the
hydrogen atom, lightest of all, was more than 1800
times heavier than one of these particles. With this
discovery the old-fashioned atom was doomed.
The exhausted tube with which Thomson experi-
mented was the first atom bombarding gun. Its glow
was the visible evidence that atoms were being
smashed. Electrons streamed from one end of the
tube to the other. Sometimes one would hit an atom
of gas which the pump had not removed. A negative
electron was then ripped off. Whereupon the atom
would glow in a sort of electrical anguish. Thomson
tr.ecl ^a., at.cr ^as. A. \\a\s the Hying electrons knocked
o(l electrons from gas atoms. And the electrons were
always the same.
So Thomson came to this view : an electric dis-
SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
charge in a tube is composed of electrons and partly
destroyed atoms (ions). Atoms are composed of
electrons. Perhaps electricity (energy) and matter are
merely different manifestations of the same thing. The
electron theory of matter was born, and with it a
revolution in physics.
But how was the atom constructed ? Thomson knew
that negative electrons must be held in the neutral
atom by some force. So he imagined a sphere of posi-
tive electrons in which his negative electrons were
buried as in a jelly. Two forces opposing each other
would give us neutral atoms gold, tin, or gas atoms.
Was the hypothesis correct? Young Ernest Ruther-
ford, one of Thomson's students, decided to find out.
He needed some instrument which could deliver more
demolishing blows than streaming electrons in a
Crookes tube. Nothing that science had invented
would do. He turned to radium. It shot out rays of
three different kinds. One kind consisted of alpha
particles, cores of helium atoms. These the radium
hurled from itself with a speed of 12,000 miles a
second. They were many times heavier than negative
electrons, and they had a terrific hitting power because
of their speed. Let these heavy, swift alpha particles
bombard a bit of matter a piece of tissue-like gold-
leaf, for example and what would happen?
Even with these faster, heavier bullets it was hard
to blast atoms apart. Rutherford found that when a
bullet, an alpha particle, did strike home it was turned
aside just as a baseball is deflected from a stone wall.
THE MYSTERY OF THE ATOM 99
There must be something hard inside the atom,
reasoned Rutherford something like the stone of a
cherry. He fired alpha particles at atoms of nitrogen
gas. Out flew an entirely new particle, a proton as he
called it, a piece of hydrogen, a positively charged
particle. Hydrogen coming out of nitrogen? But
this was the transmutation of matter about which
alchemists had dreamed !
Rutherford fired alpha particles at boron, sodium,
aluminium, phosphorus, fluorine. Always cores of
hydrogen or protons flew out of the struck atoms.
There was only one conclusion protons (hydrogen)
must be the basis of all matter. Old William Prout
was right.
Neither Thomson nor Rutherford had demolished
the atom. But they had chipped it. Thomson's chips
were outer electrons; Rutherford's, inner protons.
Both kinds could be deflected by magnets.
Rutherford's way of bombarding the nucleus with
alpha particles has never been abandoned. Its pos-
sibilities are not yet exhausted. Profs Walther Bothc
and Wilhelm H. Becker of the University of Giessen
tried it on beryllium. Powerful rays came out. Rays of
what? Gamma rays, thought Bothe and Becker rays
like X-rays, but much more penetrating. Radium sends
them out too.
Pierre Joliot and his wife Irene Curie repeated the
experiment. They saw the rays easily passing through
lead but not so easily through paraffin-wax, cello-
phane, or hydrogen.
IOO SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
Rutherford's associate in Cambridge, James Chad-
wick, was interested. He, too, verified the existence
of the new emanation. Probably because of his old
association with Rutherford he saw clearly what was
happening to the atom. For Rutherford in England
and William Harkins of Chicago had predicted years
before that there must be within the atom not only
alpha particles, protons, and electrons, but something
which Harkins called a neutron, a particle which is
neither positive nor negative. Chadwick announced
the neutron the sensation of 1932. The whole con-
ception of the atom had to be revised.
The neutron has turned out to be a boon, simply
because it is neutral. Alpha particles, protons, electrons
these have definite electric charges. They may chip
a nucleus, but in the end they are deflected. This
neutron penetrates.
It has become the fashion now to fire alpha particles
at beryllium and let the neutrons that fly out bom-
bard other atoms. With their aid it has been possible
to excite such quiet elements as nitrogen and sodium
into radio-activity. Hopes are aroused that artificial
radio-activity may become so cheap that expensive
radium may be dispensed with in the treatment of
cancer.
In 1933 Dr Carl Anderson, of Millikan's laboratory,
looked at some photographs of gas atoms wrecked by
cosmic rays. Streaks presented themselves to his eye,
like meteor trails. But one trail was bent differently
from the rest. Why? An electromagnet had pulle^
THE MYSTERY OF THE ATOM 101
negative electrons aside. This was Crookes's old experi-
ment. That one trail was bent in the opposite direc-
tion.
Anderson was quick to grasp the significance. He
beheld the luminous wake of an entirely new particle
the positron. It turned out later that cosmic radia-
tion is in part composed of positrons. That they are
constituents of matter follows from the fact that when
some elements are bombarded by gamma rays (very
powerful light-bullets shot out by radium) out fly a
positron and an electron from the same place. At any
rate, one mystery was cleared up by Anderson's dis-
covery. The proton was the positive or electrical op-
posite of the negative electron. Physicists had predicted
something that must be not only the electrical op-
posite but the mass-opposite. Now they had it.
And still the physicists are not satisfied. They fore-
told the neutron and the positron. Now they foretell
the neutrino and another particle which is the negative
opposite of the positive proton.
With each new discovery about the atom it has been
necessary to revise the conception of its structure. One
by one the models have gone. For Thomson's positive
jelly in which negative electrons were imbedded,
Rutherford substituted an atom with a dense nucleus
around which electrons revolved like planets. When
ic turned out that a mechanical atom should have
collapsed ages ago and with it the universe
physicists accepted the Bohr atom. In this the electrons
jumped from orbit to orbit as they gained or lost
1O2 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
energy and emitted light and heat as they did so.
When this conception failed to explain all that
happens to matter the mathematicians took possession
of the atom. What we have now is a lawless abstrac-
tion of which it is impossible to form any mental
picture a figment of the scientific imagination, a
wraith.
Let us not forget that atoms, protons, electrons,
positrons, neutrons, alpha particles are but inferences.
All that the physicist sees are lines and bands in a
spectrum, deflections of glowing streams by electro-
magnets, radio-active effects in matter, splashes on
luminous screens, streaks of light on photographs,
bendings and forkings of meteor-like trails, as particles
plough their way through a fog in a little chamber.
The scientist simply has to theorize. So he creates
the atom, the electron, the proton, the neutron, and
all the other particles with which we have become
acquainted. Does this mean that atoms and even
smaller particles have no existence? No one can main-
tain that. But we shall never see any of them. In all
nature there is no such thing as the atom or the elec-
tron, as theory demands. All are abstractions. Nor is
there such a thing in all nature as the mathematician's
point (which has no dimensions but only position) or
a straight line (which has no width). A cube exists
only in the mathematician's mind. Yet there are ob-
viously cubical bodies, such as houses and boxes. An
abstract atom is born of the physicist's intellectual
necessity. Yet a mass of iron is undoubtedly composed
THE MYSTERY OF THE ATOM 103
of atoms of iron. A free electron has no existence. But
a stream of electrons is an electric current or a stroke
of lightning.
The atom as it is seen by the great mathematical
physicists of our time Compton, Sommerfeld,
Schrodinger, de Broglie, Bohr, Planck, Heisenberg
is a kind of symphony. Just as a composer puts down
certain notes on ruled paper and gives them certain
intensities, qualities, and relationships, so the physicist
composes an atom of protons, electrons, and neutrons.
Both in music and in mathematics we deal with sym-
bols to which definite values and meanings are given.
Suppose that nobody on earth had ever heard a
piece of music. Then suppose that Beethoven's Fifth
Symphony were played over and over again by invis-
ible musicians. It would be the physicist's problem to
devise an apparatus which would sift out one note
from another and analyse it, infer what kind of invis-
ible instruments produce the sounds, deduce the rules
followed in determining what notes should be played
and how long and how loudly. It is not likely that he
would succeed in imagining violins and clarinets or
even musicians blowing into horns. He would postu
late merely vibrating bodies. These would meet his
requirements. Even with this simplification the odds
against his completely probing the mystery of Beet-
hoven's Fifth Symphony played by. unknown means
would be heavy.
The analogy between a symphony and an atom is
more accurate than may be supposed. We cannot make
104 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
a model of a symphony as we can of a house. Neither
can we make a model of the atom as it is now con-
ceived, because there is nothing tangible about it. We
cannot talk about Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and
hope to make anyone who has never heard it under-
stand how it sounds. Nor can we talk about the atom
in terms of protons, electrons, and neutrons in the
hope of making anybody who is not a good mathe-
matician understand how it emits particles if it is a
radium atom or why it sends out light when it is elec-
trically excited.
Music is composed according to rules. The com-
posers of the atomic symphony must also follow rules.
They must give us an atom that harmonizes with the
known facts about matter. They must explain why it
is that the neon in the tubes of Main Street's lights
glows red, why heat comes out of red-hot iron, why
roses are red, why hydrogen is a light gas and lead is
a heavy solid. It takes the highest type of intellect to
deduce the fundamentals deduce not only how the
atom may be constructed but why it behaves as it does,
why it radiates energy just as an invisible orchestra
radiates a symphony.
It turns out that we have to give up the idea of a
machine atom, meaning something that does predict-
able things Spin a dynamo and everybody knows that
electricity, a stream of electrons, will pour out. But
nothing can be predicted about individual atoms or
about their individual electrons or neutrons. The
methods of the statistician have to be applied
THE MYSTERY OF THE ATOM 105
methods somewhat like those invented by the life-
insurance actuaries to determine the mean expectancy
of life at birth. Where the individual electron may be
within the atom, what it may be doing, no one knows.
But what the average electron is doing that can be
determined to some degree. Unfortunately, the aver-
age electron has no more a tangible existence than the
'average man' of the statistician. Yet it is a necessary
conception.
Because the old 'natural laws' have broken down
within the atom, because there is nothing like a
machine, our whole conception of the universe has
changed. The more revolutionary physicists rejoice.
To them cause and effect the idea of the machine
is a relic of a savage way of thinking. We no longer
believe that Boreas pufTs out his cheeks to make the
wind blow from the north, that angels push the planets
around, as Kepler believed. Similarly, according to the
revolutionists, it is time that we gave up the childish
notion that every effect has its cause.
Out of atom-bombarding, out of the intellectual
effort to explain what the atom is, comes a new, pro-
found, and stirring conception of the universe and our
place in it. Everything was not fore-ordained with the
great act of creation, as the world believed only a
generation ago. We are free agents again. The mathe-
matical physicist who once had nothing but contempt
for the philosopher because he was not an experi-
menter has of necessity become a philosopher himself.
If atoms, electrons, and all the other particles, con-
106 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
sidered as theoretical individuals, are creatures of the
mind, if it is impossible to make measurements with-
out injecting the mind into them, the old Gradgrind
conception of the universe must go.
Something lies outside of ourselves of that the
physicist is convinced. But what it is, his symphonies
about the atom do not tell. Yet out of this questioning
comes a revolution in thought as destructive as any
that we owe to Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton.
What the ultimate effect will be on art, religion,
science itself, no one can foresee. But it is at least cer-
tain that when atom-shattering began there also began
a shattering of much scientific and philosophic self-
satisfaction.
VIII. After CoalWhat?
PROBABLY AS EARLY AS THE YEAR 2500, CERTAINLY NOT
later than 3000, the last lump of coal in the form of
coke will be flung into a furnace. A century later
museums will pay as much for a slab of British cannel
or American steam coal as for a dinosaur's egg. And
the slab will bear a label reading :
Seminole Coal
Between 1800 and 2500 (the so-called 'Coal Age')
energy was derived mainly from fossil wood or coal.
This slab was mined in West Virginia a jew hundred
miles from what was once a thriving but gloomy
industrial region of which Pittsburg, Cleveland and
Philadelphia were the principal centres. Coal was first
burned for the generation of energy after Newcomen
invented the steam pump in the eighteenth century. A
century later the steam-engine (fames Watt) was
generally introduced in Europe and America for all
industrial purposes. By lyoo coal became of such
economic and therefore political importance that it
figured in the treaty of peace signed in /9/9 at the
end of the World War.
China (1982) and the Antarctic (2025) were dis-
membered for their coal deposits by the United States,
Great Britain, France, and Germany, acting through
the International Coal Consortium. By 2500 about
two thousand million tons had been mined through-
out the world, after which it became technically im-
possible to worJ^ the deeper seams. About half of this
coal was not distilled but ignorantly burned and there-
107
108 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
fore wasted. Prices rose steadily from 25 cents a ton at
the mine in 1850 to over $300 a ton in 2000, so that,
even with the utmost thrift in the development of by-
products (see next case) and the compulsory adoption
of the mercury turbine, industries gradually aban-
doned coal for other energy sources.
The truth is that for about fifty years governments,
engineers and economists have been concerned about
our coal reserves. In 1910 the late Sir William Ramsay,
one of the greatest of English chemists, rose before the
British Association for the Advancement of Science
and pronounced England's doom. The scene was like
that in a novel by Wells. A great scientist was warn-
ing his country, still foremost in industry and com-
merce. Her supremacy rested on coal, and her coal
could not possibly last more than one hundred and
seventy-five years. There are those who were present
and who remember the hush that fell on the audience.
Not for years had any scientist so deeply stirred his
peers. England fated to go the way of Egypt, Greece,
and Rome ! It seemed incredible. And yet the figures
of coal production and consumption could not be con-
tested. The rest of the world was in a similar plight,
though not one so immediately alarming. On the
whole, there was enough coal to keep the world going
for perhaps a thousand years. What then ?
Just as in a Wellsian novel, Parliament was suffi-
ciently aroused to take action. The British Science
Guild was asked to survey known and unknown ways
AFTER COAL WHAT? 109
of driving machinery. The rise and fall of the tides,
the energy of wind and waterfall, the internal heat of
the earth, the chemical energy of wood and peat, the
store of energy in the atom, even the spinning of the
earth on its axis and its motion annually through
space, were critically examined. So desperate was the
manifest need of coal that no suggestion was wild
enough to be summarily rejected. Other British com-
missions have studied specific energy sources since that
historic meeting of the British Association.
Coal is so convenient and we are so thoroughly
trained in its utilization that we shall not see a sudden
change but a transition to some other source of energy.
Deeper and deeper the engineer will dive, cut, and
blast. How far can he go? No one knows. Mines are
now worked at depths that seemed hopeless fifty years
ago, because engineers have devised better ventilating
systems, machines for cutting coal, efficient hoists, and
electric locomotives. Depths will be reached that seem
fantastic now. When they are, the engineer will be
brought face to face not with coal but with heat the
internal heat of the earth, heat so intense that it can
take the place of fuel. The deeper a shaft is sunk, the
higher is the temperature encountered. In the Village
Deep Mine in Johannesburg circulating air becomes
so hot at 7000 feet that it could generate 3000 horse-
power were it suitably applied.
Suppose, then, we bore for heat. Energy far beyond
the requirements of the United States could be ob-
tained from a single hole. Sir Charles Parsons, inventor
110 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
of the steam turbine and one of the great engineers
of our time, once laid such a plan before the British
Association for the advancement of Science. Sink a
shaft to a depth of twelve miles, he urged. The cost ?
From ^5,000,000 to ^20,000,000. And the time?
From fifty to eighty-five years. Engineers objected.
The rock would cave in and crush the shaft. Where-
upon Prof Frank D. Dams of Montreal made a few
experiments which proved that in limestone and
granite depths of fifteen and thirty miles, respectively,
are practicable. To Parsons the expense incurred
seemed trivial compared with the benefits to be derived
new light on the constitution of the earth, beds of
radio-active minerals, gold and other precious metals,
and, above all, power, unlimited power from hot
rocks.
The technical difficulties that must be faced if Par-
sons' proposal is actually carried out are formidable.
As the miners descend, the temperature rises. How
can they endure the heat? Clothing them in suits
inflated with chilled air was the solution of John
Hodgson, an English engineer, who likewise believed
in tapping the earth for power. Means must be devised
for driving the shaft in the face of boiling-hot water
gushing from subterranean springs and for ventilating
working spaces on a scale still unattempted. New
shaft-linings must be designed, linings capable of
resisting gigantic pressures.
If the earth is to be mined for its internal heat, the
steam-engine must still be accepted as an indispensable
AFTER COAL WHAT? Ill
prime mover. Granting this and granting that a depth
of miles must be reached, power-houses may be built
underground power-houses in which the same tem-
perature will prevail the year round and in which an
artificial climate will always be maintained. The men
in the power-house will travel vertically to and from
their homes a distance greater than that now covered
daily by the average suburbanite who works in New
York and sleeps in New Jersey.
Long before heat-mining companies are organized,
industry will turn to the tides in an effort to save itself.
What can be easier and more obvious than to let the
moon raise water over the face of the earth and to
impound that water in a reservoir, so that it may run
down through a pipe and drive a water-wheel by
which electricity is generated ? Easy and obvious but
expensive compared with the cost of a steam-plant in
this first half of the twentieth century.
At the Severn Estuary, where the rise is twenty-
eight feet and an area of forty square miles is involved,
a power-plant would cost 30,000,000 at prevailing
prices for material and labour. About ^20,000,000
would be required to develop the sixty-foot tides of
the Bay of Fundy at Passamaquoddy. Only when
England is brought face to face with a coal crisis will
the Severn become a source of power. Passamaquoddy
has possibilities even now. There 500,000 horse-power
can be developed if a market can be found. England
will certainly develop her tidal power by the year 2000.
A special commission appointed as the result of
112 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
Ramsay's prophecy has located all the suitable sites
for tidal-power plants in the British Isles. One whole
study was devoted to the Severn alone.
There are seventy-two places in the British Isles
where the tidal rise and fall of water exceeds ten feet
and where a continuous output of at least 1000 horse-
power can be realized. Four million horse-power
might even now be generated in Great Britain and
Ireland by letting the moon elevate water. But only
40,000,000 tons of coal would be saved annually. Great
Britain's annual production is about 230,000,000 tons.
Clearly the moon and tides alone cannot save Great
Britain from industrial extinction. Yet the day will
assuredly come when a Londoner will point to a street-
light and say: 'D'ye see that lamp yonder? A kind
of bright moonlight. Lit by power from the Severn,
and the power comes from the moon.'
Note that in all these schemes for utilizing the tides
we rely on what is in effect an artificial waterfall.
Why not use the energy of natural falls and thus
dispense with all this cumbrous mechanism? In a hun-
dred years every waterfall in every civilized country
will undoubtedly be developed. But the salvation of
our industrial civilization lies not in tumbling cas-
cades. If every available stream in the United States
were fully utilized for power we should still be ruled
by steam and coal. The truth is that there is not
enough energy in natural falls to meet even the present
demands of the United States.
For the world as a whole the situation is only
AFTER COAL WHAT? 113
temporarily more favourable. Assuming that all the
waterfalls in the world were now developed, and that
even those in unpopulated regions were somehow
electrically driving the wheels of industry in far-
distant countries, civilized humanity would just about
be able to meet its present energy demands. No doubt
Essens and Pittsburgs will spring up near the
Victoria Falls of the Zambezi, Africa, and on other
continents where cataracts roar almost unheard in
jungles now given over to wild animals and dense
vegetation.
Granting all this, the world's need of industrial
energy grows year by year. In another century the
combined resources of the world's water-power will
prove inadequate. The United States typifies the in-
dustrial nation of the future. Even now the capacity
of our constructed hydro-electric plants is nearly equal
to that of all European water-power plants combined.
A few favoured countries like Switzerland, Norway,
Italy and Japan may possibly survive because of their
abundant water-power. The world as a whole must
look to other substitutes for coal.
The problem is further simplified, so far as fore-
casting is concerned, by the extraordinary efficiency
to which the water turbine has been brought. One
hundred per cent, efficiency is clearly the maximum
attainable in any machine. The water turbine is
already about 90 per cent, efficient. Hence the slight
improvement still to be made cannot mean that,
through some streak of genius, we may make a
H
114 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
waterfall develop much more energy than is now
thought possible.
There is more hope in sea water not for England
but for the tropics. And that hope depends on the
difference in temperature that prevails between the
surface and the bottom. The higher the waterfall,
the more power at the shaft of the water-wheel; the
bigger the temperature-drop, the bigger the power-
potentialities.
In this principle Georges Claude, a distinguished
French chemist and engineer, sees salvation. ' There
is an inexhaustible store of power in tropical waters,
which, if utilized, will change the whole character of
equatorial communities now lying industrially dor-
mant,' he told the French Academy of Sciences.
' The construction of the necessary plant is no more
difficult than laying a transatlantic cable.'
Claude happens to have made a fortune out of
liquid air, synthetic nitrogen, acetone and neon
lamps, and is, therefore, able to indulge in more than
prophecy. In Cuba he built an experimental power-
plant which had neither roaring furnaces nor tall
chimneys. To him it was the harbinger of a new
coalless power era; for it was to generate energy
merely by letting heat run downhill as if it were so
much water. Claude selected Matanzas, Cuba, for
his experiment because there he found two tempera-
tures sufficiently far apart. The surface temperature of
the sea in the torrid zone varied from 79 to 86 degrees
Fahrenheit. At a depth of 2000 to 3000 feet a ther-
AFTER COAL WHAT? 11$
mometcr registered from 39 to 41 degrees Fahrenheit.
If the temperature of the surface could be transferred
to that of the chilly depths, a steam engine could be
driven in the process.
Water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit. How, then,
can steam be generated at 86 degrees, the temperature
of surface water in the tropics? Boiling-points are
determined by atmospheric pressure. Remove the
pressure partially and the boiling-point is lowered.
On the top of a mountain water boils more easily than
at sea-level because the atmosphere does not press
down upon it so hard. Pump the air out of a vessel
and it is easy enough to make water boil at ordinary
room temperatures. A vacuum pump was therefore
an indispensable part of Claude's equipment. The
pump created a partial vacuum which caused water
drawn from the surface of the Gulf of Mexico to boil.
The steam generated drove a turbine and then passed
to a condenser which was cooled by what? Sea
water lifted from a depth of 2000 feet sea water
which was only a few degrees above the freezing-
point all the year round. Thus the steam exhausted
by the turbine was condensed and a vacuum was
created which extended back through the system. The
steam naturally rushed towards the vacuum in the
condenser, tried to fill it, and in the process pushed
against the blades of a turbine. So the shaft of a
dynamo was turned. The starting vacuum pump was
cut off after the water in the 'boiler' began to give
off steam.
Il6 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
This was no paper invention. Claude had actually
built in Belgium a small experimental plant which
ran with a temperature-drop far less than that at
his disposal in Cuba. His Matanzas plant, though
commercially unsuccessful, was as significant in the
evolution of society as the steam-engine of James
Watt.
Tidal power shrinks to insignificance compared
with power derived from warm water in the tropics.
Under the action of the tides a cubic yard of water
may rise and fall a distance of perhaps ten feet, on
the average. But a cubic yard of water converted into
steam does at least as much work as if it fell 100 yards.
No wonder Claude was impelled to say to the
Academy of Sciences : ' Such a process, capable of
taking from the sea the energy of ten Niagaras, will
convert wildernesses into populous communities. The
ocean will be harnessed in a manner never dreamed
of before/
Similar prophecies are heard from those who believe
in wind-power. To be industrially useful the wind's
energy must be stored. Breezes are fitful but the de-
mands of industry steady. Hence it has been proposed
time and time again that the wind be made to drive
electric generators and that electricity be bottled in
storage batteries. The installations are expensive and
the current obtained far dearer than that furnished
by any well-managed central station.
A ioo,ooo-horse-power windmill plant is almost
inconceivable in the present state of engineering. So
AFTER COAL WHAT? I1J
far as we can see now, every house and factory would
be compelled to install its own windmill-electric plant
if all sources of energy but the wind were suddenly
cut or?. Yet the imaginative J. B. S. Haldane regards
wind hopefully. He realizes the deficiencies of our
present storage batteries. ' If a windmill in one's
back-garden could produce a hundredweight of coal
daily (and it can produce its equivalent in energy),
our coal-mines would shut down tomorrow. Even
tomorrow a cheap, foolproof, and durable storage
battery may be invented which will enable us to
transform the intermittent energy of the wind into
continuous electric power.'
And so, Haldane bids us imagine England 400
years hence an England covered with metallic
windmills working electric motors ' which in their
turn supply current at a very high voltage to great
electric mains.' Let storms rage. Great power-stations
will store their surplus energy, which will in turn
electrolytically decompose water into oxygen and
hydrogen. ' In times of calm the gases will be recom-
bined in explosion motors working dynamos which
produce electric energy once more. . Liquid hydro-
gen is weight for weight the most efficient known
method of storing energy. . Huge reservoirs of lique-
fied gases will enable wind energy to be stored, so
that it can be expended for industry, transportation,
heating, and lighting.'
The man who speaks is a biologist and not an
engineer, yet the principle advocated is not without
Il8 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
engineering and chemical validity. To admit that a
mechanism is theoretically possible is the first step
towards its realization.
Wind-power could more than drive the world's
machinery if some such storage system as that imag-
ined by Haldane could be devised. We can do little
more than guess at the energy contained in the wind,
but according to the best calculations it cannot be
less than five thousand times the world's annual coal
production. And that is why it must receive considera-
tion in any study of the coalless future.
Wind, coal, every form of free or latent energy, is
derived in the last analysis from the sun. Why not go
to the sun directly ? The earth is manifestly bathed in
its heat and light both forms of energy. Engineers
have calculated the amount of heat that falls from the
sun on the earth. Enough is received to melt a terres-
trial layer of ice 424 feet thick every year. During an
eight-hour day in the tropics the sun lavishes on a
single square mile energy equivalent to that released
by the combustion of 7400 tons of coal. About eigh-
teen hundred times more energy inundates Sahara
than is contained in the coal mined in the course of
a year. Burn 6,000,000,000 tons of coal and you unlock
the amount of energy received by that desert in but
a single day.
What we need is a trap to catch the sun. The first
man to invent one was John Ericsson, who built the
Monitor. He devised a huge concave mirror which
reflected and concentrated the sun's rays on a black-
AFTER COAL WHAT? 1 19
ened boiler at the focus and which was mechanically
turned so that it followed the sun. Thin sheets of
metal could be fused by solar heat.
Ericsson generated steam in his boiler and suc-
ceeded in driving pumps and other machines with
the highest efficiency thus far attained by solar heat
alone. Others who followed him filled their boilers
with liquids that are vaporized at low temperatures
liquids such as ammonia, sulphur dioxide, and
some organic compounds. Frank Shuman modified
Ericsson's plan by causing water to flow in a thin
layer in a long glass-covered trough on which concave
mirrors concentrated the sun's rays. Thus he managed
to drive a pump and to irrigate land at Mead, Egypt.
If solar engines are our last hope the sun and earth
will be directly geared together. Mills will be attuned
to a blazing star. The cold north where most of our
coal is situated will all but lose its population. Once
more the human race will migrate. The tropics will
be invaded by capitalists who seek to establish textile
mills, iron-works, chemical factories. A new metropo-
lis will spring up in the South-west of the United
States or in the Sahara Desert. Arid tropic land, rarely
visited by rain, will command a high price. Yet not
too high. Note that square miles must be considered
when it comes to utilizing solar heat on a large scale.
The solar engine is driven by heat. What of the
light that the sun sheds ? That too is energy. Its effects
arc partly chemical. So we find that chemists have
likewise concerned themselves with the problems of
120 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
saving our machine culture. Every green leaf bottles
solar luminous energy. Even though less than 3 per
cent, of all the radiance that beats on the earth is
thus captured, the total is still enormous. A miracle
happens. Gases of the atmosphere are changed into
living cells composed in part of starch, sugar, and
cellulose. Suppose that the process of growing could
be accelerated so that a tree would visibly push its
way up and up before our eyes and mature in days
instead of decades. The world's fuel problem of a
thousand years hence would be solved. Sugar and
wood costing but a few shillings a ton would be one
consequence.
Lastly there remains atomic energy as a possible
saviour of our culture. Soon after radio-activitv was
j
discovered, physicists began to speculate on applying
the energy that radium was radiating at a rate that
could be measured. They determined that radium was
breaking down into a succession of elements of which
the last was lead. The whole process consumes cen-
turies. Suppose we could hasten the decay of radium.
Instead of a mere trickle of energy we would obtain a
Niagara. Prof R. A. Millikan has disposed of these
romantic possibilities. ' There is not enough radium
at our disposal to run our popcorn-roasters,' according
to his calculations.
But what of atomic energy ? The late Lord Ruther-
ford once said that ' the human race may trace its
development from the discovery of a method of utiliz-
ing atomic energy.' And Aston, his pupil, listen to
AFTER COAL WHAT? 121
iim : ' If we could transmute hydrogen into helium
ve should produce energy in quantities which, for any
ensible amount of matter, are prodigious beyond the
Ireams of scientific fiction. ... In a tumbler of water
ies enough power to drive the Mauretania across the
Atlantic and back.'
When Einstein published his theory of relativity the
lope of utilizing the energy within the atom again
:ame to life, this time in another form. Einstein
howed that mass and energy are interchangeable.
Energy can be converted into mass and mass into
nergy. In transmuting hydrogen into helium, particles
nust be added to both the nucleus and the electronic
atmosphere' of the hydrogen. But the packing of the
>articles to effect this transmutation occurs not quite
n accordance with the mathematical theory. Actually
he packing is too tight. Something is left over. This
:xcess (four times 0-00778) would manifest itself,
iccording to the Einsteinian doctrine, as energy. It is
hus that the sun and the stars are able to radiate light
md heat for billions of years. But where are we to
>btain stellar pressures of millions of tons to the inch
ind heat measured in millions of degrees ? Prof Milli-
on made some calculations which convinced him that
hough elements are built up in interstellar space in
tccordance with the theory, it is impossible to dup-
icate the process on earth. Before the Society of
Chemical Industry he delivered the verdict that * there
s not even a remote likelihood that men will ever tap
his source of energy at all.' Thus vanished again the
122 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
dream of converting the hydrogen in a few gallons of
water into helium and letting excess mass dissipate
itself in energy so abundant that it could spin all the
wheels of the world.
In January 1939 a discovery was made simultan-
eously in Europe and America which momentarily
revived hope in the possibility of utilizing atomic
energy. By means of neutrons which are given oft by
beryllium when it is bombarded and which are then
slowed down, starding results are produced in
uranium. These slow neutrons split the uranium atom.
They move scarcely faster than the molecules of a gas,
these neutrons, and convert uranium into rare actino-
uranium, which is highly explosive. So unstable is this
actino-uranium that it splits into two and in the pro-
cess releases 200,000,000 volts of energy. The ratio of
energy input to energy output is about ten million to
one. Unfortunately there is no known way of practi-
cally obtaining enough pure actino-uranium, and if
there were, the dissipation or waste of energy would
be enormous. In a word, the process would be ineffi-
cient. Most of the energy required to form actino-
uranium is spent in exciting the original uranium, and
this is a dead loss in an engineering sense. So the prob-
lem of running the world's machines with energy from
the atom must again be given up for the time being.
IX. The Chemical Revolution
From the advertisement of a New York department
store :
Grandma got by with a new bonnet and a smear
of talc across her pretty little nose but times have
changed. To ma\e it easier for modern beauties we
have assembled the Personal Spectrum Kit with all
related cosmetics to suit your individual colouring.
From an article by Edsel Ford, exploiter of soya
beans and builder of motor cars :
Our engineers tell us that soya-bean oil and meal
are adaptable to by jar the greater part of the many
branches of the whole new plastic industry, and that
shortly we are to see radio and other small cabinets,
table-tops, flooring tiles in a thousand different colour-
combinations, brackets and supports of a hundred
varieties, spools and shuttles for the textile trades,
buttons and many other things of everyday use all
coming from the soya-bean fields.
From an address by the director of an industrial
research laboratory :
In 1913 the most carefully made automobile of the
day had a body to which twenty-one coats of paint
and varnish were applied. By 1920, through scientific
management, it was possible to do a body-painting job
in about eleven days. In 1923 came the first nitro-
cellulose lacquers. They cut the time to two days.
Now a whole body is made out of metal and coated
with any colour in a day.
124 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
From a German scientific magazine :
Over twenty-five years ago the German chemist
Todtenhaupt patented a process to convert the casein
of milf{ into artificial wool. Under the economic stress
of the Ethiopian war the Italians developed the process
and by October 1936 will produce several hundred
thousand pounds annually of artificial wool. No one
pretends that it is indistinguishable from natural wool.
It is still imperfect, but no more imperfect than were
the first fibres of artificial silJ{. It meets men's needs
all that can be reasonably demanded.
COSMETICS, SOYA-BEAN PRODUCTS, LACQUERS, CASEIN
'wool' all are 'synthetic', as the term is somewhat
loosely used nowadays. There are thousands more like
them, transformations of such familiar raw material as
coal, petroleum, wood, slaughterhouse refuse. Indeed,
every article that we touch is a chemical product of
some kind, and many a one has no counterpart in
nature.
Despite a million chemical compounds known to
technologists, despite the manifest artificiality of
clothes, houses, vehicles, food all the result of
chemical progress we have made but a beginning in
the creation of a new environment. If the test of a
culture based on science is the degree of its departure
from nature woven cloth instead of skins, gas in the
kitchen instead of wood, electric lights instead of
naked flames, rayon instead of silk we are still
chemical semi-barbarians.
THE CHEMICAL REVOLUTION 125
It is beside the mark to argue that a culture consists
of something more than plastic compounds that take
the place of wood and metal. Our society is what it
is just because the engineer and the chemist have
struggled with nature, torn apart her coal, her trees,
her beauty, discovered how they were created, and
then proceeded to make new combinations of their
own. The lilies of the field and the honey of the bee are
not in themselves sufficient. On every hand there is
synthesis and creation scents, fabrics, drugs, plastics,
metal like aluminium, sodium, and a few thousand
alloys that nature forgot to make when the earth was
a cooling but still glowing ball, dyes, unmatched by
any gleam in the iridescent feathers of a peacock's tail,
high explosives, lung-corroding gases, talking-machine
records made of carbolic-acid derivatives or artificial
resins.
More than the substitution of a synthetic for a
natural product is involved. Buttons that look like
ivory or bone but are neither, fibres that mimic silk
but are better, automobile upholstery that passes for
leather but is a form of guncotton, photographic films
that bring the same screen-plays to tens of millions
simultaneously for as little as a shilling these are the
outward evidences of a breaking down of social dis-
tinctions, of a profound change in life. Gunpowder
made all men the same height, said Carlyle in a fine
but unwitting comment on chemistry. The levelling is
not yet ended.
New industries came with the rise of chemistry, and
126 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
with them new opportunities for the many. There is
a closer relation between democracy and the laboratory
than the historians recognize. The environment has
been chemically changed, and with that change has
come a new vision of the social future. Is the world
ready ?
Already a beginning has been made in three-dimen-
sional chemistry. The potentialities are infinite, breath-
taking. Suppose you want something as transparent as
glass but as strong as metal. A three-dimensional
chemistry may achieve it. There is even the possibility
that active compounds may be devised active in the
sense that they would shrink from blows or electric
shocks just as if they were alive.
Much so-called synthesis is merely a transformation
of some natural product. Yet it is an evidence of social
and scientific progress. It was a tremendous step from
killing an animal and wearing its skin for protection
to weaving a fibre on a deliberately invented loom,
and thus making a soft pliable fabric. But the fibres
were nature's after all.
Indians once froze on ledges of coal. Mankind
leaped ahead when inventors showed how coal could
be used to raise steam and drive an engine. But the
new conception of coal is chemical. It is a conception
of cosmetics, alcohol, drugs, strange artificial sugars,
a million useful compounds. So with wood. It is no
longer a material out of which tables and chairs and
houses are built, but cellulose, which can be recon-
structed to assume the form of shimmering, silk-like
THE CHEMICAL REVOLUTION I2J
filaments, cattle-fodder, explosives.
Economists speak of the stupendous change brought
about in the world by the steam-engine as the 'indus-
trial revolution'. And what a revolution it was!
Factories sprang up in every civilized country. The
age of power had dawned. Coal assumed the import-
ance of a priceless national resource. The mechanical
engineer became a dominant factor in a civilization
based on the utilization of the energy in coal. He had
'harnessed heat' and transformed the earth.
Today we are in the throes of what has been called
the 'chemical revolution', a revolution which will
perhaps be as wide-sweeping in its effects as the steam
revolution that began a century ago. The stuff of
which the universe is composed is being torn apart,
molecule by molecule, atom by atom; and out of the
atomic fragments new kinds of matter are being
created and the release of a new kind of energy is
promised.
Perhaps the most imminent of all the changes that
the chemical revolution will bring about will affect the
materials of engineering. This age of power also is the
age of steel. Age of rust would be a better designation.
If it were not for our paints and protective coatings
nothing would be left of this machine civilization a
hundred years hence. No less an authority than Sir
Robert Hadfield has estimated that 29,000,000 tons of
steel rust away every year at a cost to mankind of
^'280,000,000. And this is not all. To produce every
pound of this metal, lost by conversion into oxide, four
128 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
pounds of coal had to be burned. The chemical revolu-
tion has already ushered in the age of alloys, many of
them non-corrosive. There are 2000 of them, and we
have hardly begun to create all that the world needs.
Parts of gasolene engines are now made of aluminium
alloys. All-metal airplanes have for years been made
of duraluminium a strong, tough, artificial metal.
Aluminium alloys can be made as strong as steel. Very
rapidly they are making their way in industry.
What a tremendous amount of energy is wasted in
hauling, lifting, and spinning unnecessarily heavy
masses of metal! It costs now threepence a pound a
year to move the dead weight of a street-car. Think of
the solid steel trains hauled by solid steel locomotives,
of automobiles made largely of steel, of cranes that
must be made of tremendous size and power to lift
gigantic masses of steel machinery ! Tradition has ob-
sessed us with the notion that weight and strength are
synonymous. Gradually the metallurgist is breaking
down this old conservatism.
Ten thousand years ago, indeed until very recently,
the metallurgist was a random smelter and mixer of
metals. Bronze was one of his magnificent accidental
discoveries. But how different today ! With X-rays he
peers right into the heart of a crystal for nearly every-
thing in the crust of the earth is crystalline and sees
how the atoms are placed. He juggles temperatures
relates them to such properties as toughness, mag-
netism, lightness. He makes a mixture of aluminium,
nickel, and copper. The result is a magnet that can
THE CHEMICAL REVOLUTION
lift a hundred times its own weight or an alloy so light
that stratosphere balloon gondolas are made of it.
Already he has reached the stage where he can syn-
thesize a metal for a special purpose. Suppose he were
to design and build an alloy with five times the tensile
limit of any we now have not a wild impossibility.
When he succeeds, ' the art of transportation on land
and sea will be revolutionized and, unfortunately, the
methods of warfare,' thinks Dr Vannevar Bush of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Many of these alloys still to be discovered will be
used in the home. Wood as a structural material is
already doomed. Two centuries hence an ordinary
white-pine kitchen chair of today will be treasured as
an almost priceless antique. Quarried stone will be
used only for buildings near the quarry. For the most
part our houses will be cages of rustless alloy steel,
around which cement or some other artificial plastic
material will be poured.
Furniture will be made of a beautiful synthetic
plastic material, a combination of carbolic acid and
formaldehyde discovered and first applied industrially
by a Belgian chemist, Dr L. H. Baekeland, which is
destined to become so cheap that it will compete with
wood. The panes of the windows through which sun-
light streams and the glassware that glitters on the
carbolic-acid-formaldehyde sideboard will be made of
a scratch-proof synthetic product of organic chemistry
which will be transparent, insoluble in water, and
unbreakable.
130 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
Draperies, rugs, bed and table 'linen' by the year
2000 will be tissues of synthetic fibres. Washing will
be obsolete. Bed-sheets, table-cloths, and napkins will
be thrown away after use. Draperies and rugs will not
be cleaned, for as soon as they show signs of dirt or
wear new ones will take their places. The household
of the chemical future will probably spend no more
in a year for its fabrics than it does now for mere
laundering. Hence housework will be reduced to a
pleasant minimum involving scarcely more than the
dusting of synthetic furniture and the mopping of
synthetic floors.
Even dish-washing will be unnecessary. By A.D. 2000
the chemist will have discovered a method of making
bowls, cups, saucers and plates out of a compound
which will dissolve in water superheated to a tempera-
ture of 300 degrees Fahrenheit. The 'china' or 'por-
celain*, after serving its purpose, will be tossed into a
superheating cooker to dissolve like sugar in tea and
run down a drain. Soluble dishes of artistic design
will cost only a few pence each. Their dissolving tem-
perature must be higher than that of boiling water, so
that even a scalding hot soup can be served without
fear of disaster. Hence the superheating. Only knives
and forks and pots and pans will be scoured if these
relics of the quaint past are still used.
Synthetic, too, will be the apparel of those who will
live this easy life. Cotton, silk, wool and such fibres as
linen will still be spun, but only the very rich or the
very snobbish will buy the fabrics into which they arc
THE CHEMICAL REVOLUTION
woven. Such material will be as unnecessary as are the
expensive furs in which fashionable men and women
still clothe themselves mere survivals of a pictur-
esque time when animals had to be skinned or clipped
to make a suit of clothes. Already the silkworm is
doomed as an adjunct of industry. Time was when
only the worm knew how to change the woody
tissues, or cellulose, of a tree into glossy threads. Now
the chemist converts the tree into rayon and even
makes silk, or something very like it, out of coal,
limestone, and nitrogen.
Synthetic wool is a commercial reality. The achieve-
ment was inevitable. Perhaps within ten years, cer-
tainly within twenty, a man will buy a ready-made
suit of synthetic wool as warm as any now made from
natural wool, and free from shoddy, and 2 will be
a high price to pay for it. Even the most knowing
sheep would be deceived by the yarn. There will be
the same 'feel', the same fluffiness and waviness.
This 2 suit is almost attainable now. In the more
distant future synthetic fibres still to be evolved will
completely revolutionize tailoring. The cheapest suit
of clothes is now stitched. What if machines do most
of the sewing and if buttonholes are mechanically
formed and finished? The cost is high. Suppose we
assign to the chemist and the efficiency engineer this
problem of keeping the body warm and the person
presentable. The first step is to abandon the old tradi-
tion of durability. Why must even the cheapest suit
last at least a year? Is not the standard merely a hcri-
132 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
tage from a time when money was scarce and when
a suit of clothes simply had to endure?
The synthetic chemist proceeds to create new fibres.
Cheapness is his goal. His threads may be lacking in
tensile strength and therefore in durability. But the
fabric into which they are woven is not intended to
last a year. Something much cheaper than artificial
silk or wool is produced. In fact, it is so cheap that a
suit can be made for five shillings a suit that will be
as ephemeral as a butterfly and will be thrown into
the ash-barrel in two weeks.
You step into a department store of 1975 and
say : ' I want a spring suit. Something in grey
striped.'
The salesman disappears. He comes back, not with
a suit, but with pieces of a suit. You look them over
with a critical eye. ' Rather neat,' you decide. A fitter
is summoned. He drapes the pieces upon you and then
proceeds to paste them together yes, paste so that
you receive for five shillings what is actually a custom-
made suit. The paste is another triumph of chemistry
a composition which makes it impossible to rip
scams apart without destroying the fabric itself. And
the suit fits as if the tailor of nobility had fashioned it.
Why pasting instead of stitching? Because stitching,
even machine stitching, is an unnecessary expense, a
heritage of tradition.
The fibres are the chemist's contribution to tailoring
of 1975; the method of stamping out pieces of the
right shape at a single stroke of a die, to be pasted
THE CHEMICAL REVOLUTION 133
together later, is the efficiency engineer's. Two dozen
perfectly fitted suits a year at a total cost of 5. Beau
Brummell could demand no more.
So it will be with cravats, socks, handkerchiefs, and
shoes. From head to foot the glass of fashion of 1975
will dazzle the Avenue, a living tribute to the in-
genuity of the synthetic chemist. The very cane that
he twirls will be synthetic, and so will be the diamond
(indistinguishable from a South African crystal) that
flashes on his finger. Only a few laundries will sur-
vive to charge outrageous prices for washing the linen
of a handful of rich old mossbacks who, so far as the
eye can tell, might be wearing synthetic fabrics instead
of real stitched wool, silk, flax, or cotton.
Rags will be unknown and inexcusable. The beg-
gars of 1975 will be quite as presentable as stock-
brokers, actors, and others who set store by the cut
and the fit of their coats and trousers. Indeed, in the
chemical millennium it is possible that a workless
man may implore a passer-by not for the price of
the customary cup of coffee but for the price of a suit
of clothes.
The synthetically clad man of the future will surely
nourish himself on synthetic food. Ultimately even
the soluble dish will be regarded as an interesting
heirloom of a still fairly savage past when man chewed
vegetation which had been boiled or baked, and
actually killed and roasted animals for the sake of
their proteins. But the year 2000 seems much too early
a date for the achievement of synthetic nutriment,
134 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
considering the staggering difficulties that the chemist
must overcome.
Marcellin Berthelot, the great French synthetic
chemist, predicted an era when man would eat three
food pellets instead of three meals a day. Physicians
who are good evolutionists know better. Teeth, jaws,
digestive tract, the whole organism of man, have been
ingeniously adapted to convert plant and animal
tissues into bodily energy. There is evidence enough
that subsistence on preserved foods is attended with ills
with which savages are never afflicted. It is said that
the Eskimos never knew what the toothache was until
they ate the food of the white explorers. For the
simple reason that man was constructed to thrive on
natural rather than on synthetic food, it is not likely
that he will live on pellets. The chemist will give him
the bulk and the texture to which his digestive tract
long ago adapted itself.
Probably the chemist's first achievement in synthe-
sizing a food will be the commercial creation of
sugar. A beginning has been made in our time by
Prof E. C. C. Baly of the University of Liverpool. He
knows that green plants will not produce sugar from
carbon dioxide and water unless light is present.
There must be what the chemist calls 'photosynthesis',
the most fundamental process in all organic nature.
The sap of a plant, largely water, itself a compound
of hydrogen and oxygen, rises from the roots to the
leaves; the green colouring matter of the leaves
(chlorophyll) takes the hydrogen of this water and
THE CHEMICAL REVOLUTION 135
combines it with the carbon of the carbon dioxide
into what the chemist calls a carbohydrate, a chemical
combination of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. One
such carbohydrate is sugar. Out of nothing but light,
water and carbon a green leaf produces it.
Prof Baly, knowing this fact, proceeds to imitate
nature. In his Liverpool laboratory are dazzling
electric lamps artificial suns. Also there are quartz
vessels through which invisible ultra-violet rays
emitted by the lamps pass, acting chemically on the
contents of the vessels. And the contents? Largely
water in which carbon dioxide is dissolved. Finely
powdered iron, nickel, and aluminium compounds
are added to the water catalysts, or substances which
take no part in the chemical action, but provide a
large surface on which the action can take place. The
ultra-violet rays from the artificial suns are turned on
the vessels, and a syrupy carbohydrate is obtained.
Analysis reveals it to be sugar.
The light works the miracle, as Prof Baly has
proved to his satisfaction over and over again. He
performed the experiment hundreds of times in the
dark. Never could he synthesize sugar without light.
In nature the photosynthesis of carbohydrates is asso-
ciated with the green colouring matter of leaves; the
chlorophyll is probably a catalyst. To mimic nature
with greater fidelity, Prof Baly went so far as to use
coloured catalysts, such as the carbonates of cobalt and
nickel. Again sugar was synthesized this time with
the aid of visible rays.
136 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
Here we have the primitive beginning of a future
synthetic sugar and starch industry, of something
akin to a life-process. The raw materials are abundant
and cheap. Instead of carbon dioxide, of which the
atmosphere contains but little, the chemist will use
coal. Water he finds everywhere. Catalysts he uses
over and over again. Instead of ploughing the soil
and cultivating sugar-beets, the farmer will watch
pressure-gauges or control the ultra-violet lamps of
some synthetic food corporation. Nature produces
many varieties of sugar. The chemist will make them
all out of water and carbon. Just as he has succeeded
in giving us dyes that have no natural counterparts,
so he will give us sugars that nature never dreamed
of making.
The achievement of the synthetic equivalent of a
hen's egg or a slice of roast beef will be immensely
more difficult. We must learn how to build up pro-
teins. A great German chemist, Emil Fischer, did
more than any other scientist of our time to throw
light on this most difficult of all duplications of the
life-process, and won the Nobel prize for his work.
The protein of an egg or of roast beef is a highly
complex compound of nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen,
sulphur, and oxygen. Fischer succeeded in breaking
down albuminoids (compounds which have some of
the properties of albumin and hence of protein) and
then rebuilding something like them out of the units.
But only something like them. He obtained what are
known as synthetic peptides, which resemble natural
THE CHEMICAL REVOLUTION 137
albumins in many respects. In the opinion of the late
Prof Abel of Johns Hopkins, * the contributions of
Emil Fischer surpass in their ultimate significance for
chemical physiology those ever made by any other
man in the entire history of biological and medical
science.'
To nine out of ten of us a chemist such as Fischer
is still something of a magician, a mysterious figure,
impelled to mix together strange and sometimes dan-
gerous compounds, only to discover that he has at his
command an explosive that will blast mountains
asunder or a plastic that is a substitute for wood. But
the chemist knows better. He deals with such invisi-
bilities as atoms and molecules exactly as if they were
levers and gears. In his mind's eye he sees them
assembling themselves into new structures. He deli-
berately plans new forms of matter as an architect
plans a house or an engineer a streamlined train.
Contrast, for example, the organic chemist of a
century ago with his university-trained counterpart of
today. Goodyear comes to mind. ' Discovered how to
vulcanize rubber,' we say of him with a certain awe.
He boiled, pounded, kneaded rubber, mixed it with
scores of different substances, exposed it to sunlight
and kept it in darkness, and at last achieved success
in vulcanization by frying it in a pan with sulphur.
There is less of this floundering today. Like the archi-
tect and the engineer, the chemist is now a conscious
designer a designer of molecules, of new forms of
matter.
138 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
The picture that the chemist draws of an arrange-
ment of atoms in a molecule may not be absolutely
correct. But it must be a practical help. The fact that
it does help is an indication that it must be at least
approximately right.
Executing the design is not so easy as conceiving it.
Sometimes the atoms can be arranged in the desired
way only at impossibly high temperature and pres-
sure; sometimes there would be explosions. Contem-
plating nature with a technical eye, what does the
chemist see? These trees, animals, sweet-smelling
perfumes, these poisons that the reptiles and insects
secrete, all these she has made without fierce tempera-
tures, tons of corroding acids and alkalis, or powerful
electric currents. Even the vetches and beans of the
field reduce nitrogen from the air without terrific heat
or stout vessels of steel.
So the chemist must perforce limit himself, like the
architect, to what can be accomplished with available
materials and forces. Marcellin Berthelot once re-
marked : * The domain in which chemical synthesis
exercises its creative power is vaster than that of nature
herself.' While this is undoubtedly true, still chemists
have to batter down atomic gates. Nature opens them
with a key.
X. Can the Laboratory Create Life?
LIFE WAS ONCE REGARDED AS A PURELY CHEMICAL
manifestation of matter. Now it is recognized that
forces are at play within and without the cell which
enable it to adapt itself in a limited degree to its en-
vironment.
No one man made this discovery. But because of it,
as Prof F. G. Donnan has pointed out, ' the day is
nearer when the physicist will be able to create life,
and there is no reason why life on a physico-chemical
plane should not be constructed by the creation of
living cells/
This daring statement is based largely on some re-
markable studies which Prof A. V. Hill made of the
chemical part played by oxygen in muscular activity.
He found that five-eighths of a horse-power can be
exerted in such efforts as rowing. A gallon of oxygen
supplies the rower (if used with 25 per cent, efficiency)
with enough energy to lift his own weight of 140
pounds about 125 feet. But the heart and lungs can
supply at most a gallon of oxygen a minute.
Nature has made it possible for man to overload
himself for short periods by emergency chemical pro-
cesses. Glycogen, the animal starch of the body, is con-
verted into lactic acid the very acid found in sour
milk. Thus huge amounts of energy are released. But
the formation of lactic acids is accompanied by fatigue.
So the panting rower rests. As he inhales oxygen
deeply, he rids himself of the lactic acid and hence of
fatigue.
How much muscular work a man can do is deter-
'39
140 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
mined by what Prof Hill calls the 'amount of oxygen
debt' that can be incurred. Four or five quarts of
oxygen is about the debt limit of most athletes, and
fifteen means physical collapse. There is no guessing
about this. Breathing in oxygen and eating food to
supply energy are common to all animals. Hill has
even measured the oxygen consumption of the cock-
roach and determined its 'debt'. Not only that, but he
has ground the cockroach up and analysed its tissues
to discover what changes have taken place.
Muscular tissue is composed of cells that incur and
discharge the oxygen debt. Hence Donnan has com-
mented thus on Hill's work : ' If you deprive the liv-
ing cell of oxygen or food it dies and begins at once to
go to pieces. Why is this ? What is cellular death ? The
atoms and molecules are still there. . . . Has some
vital impulse escaped unobserved? '
The more philosophers and scientists discover about
life the clearer their definitions become, even though
they are still turbid. For centuries they talked about
'vital force'. Mere words. 'Biotic energy' is no better.
Even the great Huxley spoke of 'some kind of matter
common to all living things' (another form of what
biologists call 'vitalism') and imbued science with the
notion that protoplasm is 'living protein'.
There is an almost medieval ring to these theories
for all the learned words in which they are expressed.
'Elixir of life', the phrase bandied about when
America was discovered, is just as 'scientific* as 'biotic
energy'. Yet that half-quack, half-scientist, Paracelsus,
CAN THE LABORATORY CREATE LIFE?
divined that * man is a chemical composition, for
which reason it is necessary to use chemical means to
combat disease.' Not a bad guess for the early six-
teenth century. But Paracelsus had to spoil it by advo-
cating a charlatan's formula for creating the 'vital
spirit' in an alembic.
That we must look for some undiscovered force or
compound instead of new energy relations is a view
that dies hard. Prof Henry Fairfield Osborn wondered
whether there may not be 'some unknown element
which thus far has not betrayed itself in chemical
analysis', and which may be the life-giving principle
an element like radium, which was concealed in
rocks for ages before the chemist became aware of it.
' Or again, some unknown chemical element to which
the hypothetical term bion might be given may lie
waiting discovery within this complex of known
elements. Or an unknown source of energy may be
active here.' We recognize 'vitalism' and the 'elixir of
life', even though they are well disguised in modern
verbal clothes. The chemist makes short work of any
plea for a belief in unknown elements. He knows
exactly how many elements there are and their proper-
ties.
We live. Yet who among us can say what life is?
We walk, talk, grow, reproduce our kind, and die.
The rocks are not like us in these respects. Five
thousand years of study has not yet made it possible
to define life. Streets and houses were illuminated by
electricity long before engineers knew that a current
142 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
is composed of countless billions of electrons. Defini-
tions are therefore not absolutely indispensable in the
onward sweep of science.
On the other hand, engineers knew exactly what a
generator was and how it should be constructed in
order to produce current that would light a lamp or
drive a trolley-car. In other words, they knew all that
was necessary to make an electric generator knew
the attributes and functions of each part. Little is
known about life-generators, and that is one reason
why science is still baffled by the mystery of life. The
more simple animal and plant forms are studied, the
deeper is this mystery. Enumerating the functions of
the simplest living organism and then insisting that a
structure is alive if it performs these functions is use-
less.
To be alive a thing must move spontaneously, you
say. A locomotive does that. If you must have some-
thing less complex drop some chloroform on a
hardened shellac surface. The drop moves about like
an amoeba. * Surface tension ! ' exclaims the chemist.
' The force that enables some insects to walk on water
and causes rain to collect in globules on a waterproofed
cloth.' Probably it is this same surface tension that
makes the living amoeba so restless.
But the amoeba eats by the simple process of wrap-
ping itself around its meal. Lifeless matter cannot eat,
it may be argued. Can't it? Bring a drop of chloro-
form near a glass particle coated with shellac. Some-
thing extraordinary happens. The drop Hows around
CAN THE LABORATORY CREATE LIFE? 143
the particle, devours it, digests the shellac and then,
most wonderful of all, actually rejects the indigestible
glass particle ! A living amoeba can do no more.
Hard pressed by these performances of lifeless
matter, we remember that animals and plants grow.
Surely lifeless matter does not grow. Throw a lump
of copper sulphate into a dilute solution of potassium
ferrocyanide. A brown envelope develops. It throws
out upward-growing runners. In half an hour the
solution is filled with a 'plant' that closely resembles
seaweed something that has grown in a very real
sense. The weight of the artificial plant may be 150
times that of the original copper sulphate. Dozens of
inorganic crystals thus grow and reproduce their kind.
Like any living thing they need but a supply of the
requisite pabulum. Even the process of self-division
whereby a simple cell reproduces itself can be
mimicked with solutions of common table-salt con-
taining suspended carbon particles.
So the biochemist runs the gamut of the supposedly
exclusive attributes of life only to find that 'dead'
matter may have them, too, although not all at the
same time. Herbert Spencer realized this. Yet he could
not resist the temptation to define 'life' as 'the con-
tinuous adjustment of internal relations to external
relations'. This has a fine impressiveness that carries
conviction. When we find out what the terms actually
mean we discover that the electric refrigerator in the
kitchen meets them perfecdy. The temperature rises.
At once the motor starts automatically when the tern-
144 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
perature within the refrigerator has dropped below the
critical point. The thermostat by which the motor is
controlled is ever ready to adjust internal to external
relations.
Now this inability of the biochemist to tell us what
life is proves that we cannot be sure that we always
recognize life when we see it. There is no sharp dis-
tinction between the organic and the inorganic,
between the living and the non-living. Atoms are com-
bined into molecules and molecules into such elaborate
structures as salt and starch, cane-sugar or man. All
matter has evolved and is still evolving from the
simple to the complex. Hence Prof T. C. Chamberlin
reasoned that there must have been an unbroken series
of evolving organisms from the first cell that was
endowed with life to a Ph.D.
Nature may be still busily creating life and causing
it to evolve in ways of which we are not yet aware.
She may be making scores of experiments in an
attempt to evolve life from lifeless matter. If there are
no fossil records of these attempts it is because they
never progressed far enough.
Since the creation of life was no sudden animation
of something inert but a gradual process of change
from a mass of gas, a rock, a clod, through a stage
between the animate and the inanimate to the living
slime that we call protoplasm, there are biologists
enough who believe that science ought to seek in
nature for transitional forms of life.
It may be easier to synthesize near-life than to
CAN THE LABORATORY CREATE LIFE? 145
recognize it as such in some noisome, slippery mass
gathered on the shore of a lake. In the laboratory the
condition of experiment can be controlled. For this
reason alone the efforts of the biochemist to solve the
riddle of life by synthesizing something that will physi-
cally and chemically resemble an irritable, hungry,
restless, self-reproducing cell are more than justified.
Hand in hand with laboratory attempts at synthesiz-
ing living matter must go a profounder study of nature
the quest for something which seems animate, yet
which cannot be accepted as completely animate.
Even when the biologist asserts dogmatically that
the lowest form of life is protoplasm and that every
simple cell has a nucleus, he is not as precise as he
thinks he is. Once upon a time chemists explained that
iron rusted because iron had an 'affinity' for oxygen,
which was no more a scientific explanation of what
actually happened than if they had more simply said,
' iron and oxygen fall passionately in love with each
other and cannot be kept apart.' By giving the name
'protoplasm' to a slimy mass which is composed of
individual living cells and calling the dense core of
each cell a 'nucleus' we simply identify objects for
scientific study. We shed no light on the dark mystery
of life.
'All life comes from life' has been an accepted
doctrine in science for two centuries. Yet there was
certainly a time when the earth was too hot to support
life. Clearly nature must have succeeded in accomplish-
ing what the biochemist is attempting now to create
K
146 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
life out of matter that is not alive. So the ambitions of
our scientific Frankensteins are not as mad and vaunt-
ing as they seem to be at first glance.
Consider the simplest protoplasmic cell under the
microscope a protozoon. Reproduction is simple.
The cell simply splits in two and each new cell again
in two. The process can go on for ever. * The cell is
immortal,' declared Weismann decades ago. So it
seems. Prof Woodruff has watched a simple organism
called paramecium reproduce itself by self-division
through 9000 generations in thirteen and one-half
years comparable with 250,000 years of human life.
Combine several billion body and germ cells to form
what the chemist calls a closed system. It turns out to
be a human being. Its parents christen it John Wright.
One day you read in the newspaper that something
sensational happened to this closed system : ' Died,
John Wright at his home after a brief illness. Age 64.
Funeral private. No flowers.'
What actually happened ? Why should he die when
he was composed of immortal cells? The best we can
wring from science is that John Wright began to die
when he was a baby. Every day he threw off useless
cells and useless molecules which he had broken down
into stuff that he could use and into wastes. In fact, he
had to die thus in order to live. If he managed to reach
the age of 64 it was because he built new cells faster
than he killed them. The day came when the doctor
pronounced him dead.
Of course, the doctor was wrong. The cells of the
CAN THE LABORATORY CREATE LIFE? 147
human heart have been revived and the heart caused
to beat regularly eighteen hours after doctors have
signed a death-certificate. In some lower animals the
same result has been obtained days after 'death'. John
Wright was not scientifically dead until the last living
cell of him found it impossible to feed itself, extract
energy from something outside of itself, and divide in
two to reproduce itself.
John Wright's complexity proved to be his undo-
ing. The price of being able to invent telescopes, look
through them and discover that Jupiter has nine
moons, of writing Hamlet, of composing the Ninth
Symphony, or painting 'La Gioconda' is death. To
Carrel it is a price worth paying. 'The mysterious
energy which is created by the cerebral cells or which
expresses itself through them is after all the greatest
marvel of this universe/ he says.
To Metchnikoflf old age was a disease. The experi-
ments of Carrel support the view. His famous chicken
heart is immortal only because its cells feed on young
embryonic matter and because the wastes it throws off
are washed away. On old plasma heart-tissue does not
thrive so well. It seems as if old organisms do produce
some substance which saps their vigour and that age-
ing is indeed a disease. So it seems that the 'elixir of
life' for which science has been seeking these many
centuries is actually the elixir of youth.
If we understand death we understand life. Hence
the case of John Wright is of supreme importance to
the biologist and the scientist who seeks to create life.
148 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
Death is a biological event. If only we knew what
happens when a cell dies or is killed we would know
what life is. That is why biologists are as much con-
cerned with dying as with living. They seek to dis-
cover why the individual cells of John Wright are
deathless, yet he as an individuality dies. If more were
known about deathless protoplasm it might be possible
to prolong human life.
By reducing the breeding temperature from 30 to
10 degrees centigrade Jacques Loeb prolonged the life
of fruit-flies 90 per cent. He estimated that if he could
lower the temperature of the human body to 7-5 de-
grees centigrade, human life could be extended 1900
years. John Wright was a chemical complex. His life
was short and merry, because he was hot. Human
beings are not fruit-flies. Their temperatures cannot
be raised and lowered sharply. But Loeb proved that
death can be staved off if we can control only one of
the conditions of life. He went far towards proving
that protoplasm is a name for a chemical and physical
mechanism that life can be controlled in lower
organisms just as we can control any simple chemical
reaction.
Before a living cell can be created in the laboratory
the chemist must know much more. As yet he can
no more define protoplasm than he can define life.
Simple as it may appear under the microscope, a
protozoon is nevertheless a microcosm which is far
more complex than a dynamo or a grand-piano.
CAN THE LABORATORY CREATE LIFE? 149
Within the cell are bodies of many different types,
and each has a definite function. The biochemist docs
not know what the functions are. Some of the bodies
are alive and others are not. Even the lifeless play
some part in the tiny organism. What part? The
answer is silence. The biologist cannot point to any
part of a microphotograph which shows a cell en-
larged several hundred times and say positively :
' This is the very seat of life, the shrine of shrines.'
In fact, all the evidence indicates that life is a property
of the cell as a whole, a complex of innumerable
chemical and physical reactions in a system.
Suppose we attempt to construct a cell. First of all,
we must find out of what a cell is composed. We
analyse protoplasm just as we would water or a rock,
only the task is much more difficult. What does the
analysis show? Oxygen 72 per cent., carbon 13-5 per
cent., hydrogen 9-1 per cent., nitrogen 2-5 per cent.
There are also traces of chlorine, phosphorus, sulphur,
sodium, calcium, silicon, iron, manganese, iodine,
magnesium, and fluorine. Protoplasm is composed of
much the same stuff as the earth itself evidence that
it sprang from the earth. We mix all these chemical
components together in just the right proportions.
And the result? A laboratory mud-pie. Not a sign of
life. Nothing that even remotely resembles protoplasm
as an organism. Life cannot be compounded like a
drug-store prescription.
A colloid chemist looks over the mass with a disap-
proving eye. * A cell is a colloidal system,' he remarks.
150 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
What does he mean by a colloidal system? A crystal
of any common mineral salt when dissolved will pass
through a thin animal membrane. Were it not for that
membrane its contents, mineral salts among them,
would work their way through as a result of what is
called osmosis. It is not enough to mix the proper
elements together in the right proportions. The mole-
cules must also be of the right size. Then surface
tension must be exerted to hold this aggregation of
molecules together within the thin wall.
The colloid chemist has introduced physics into the
problem. We begin all over again. This time we
manage to make tiny cells filled with the proper
chemical elements in proper combination. We look
through the microscope. We see movement. For a
moment it looks as if these infinitesimal artificial
organisms lived. Then we remember the drop of
chloroform that slipped about on hard shellac with
such deceptive, realistic spontaneity. What we behold
is surface tension at work, pushing cells hither and
thither. We have not created life after all. We look
more closely. There is no nucleus and no such distri-
bution of bodies through the whole mass as we
observe it in a protozoon. Besides, the cell refuses to
split and form other cells like itself.
Another expert is called in a fermentation chemist.
' You ought to learn something about enzymes if you
want to be a Frankenstein,' is his devastating criti-
cism. You inquire about enzymes and you find out
that they are bodies which have the peculiar property
CAN THE LABORATORY CREATE LIFE?
of bringing about chemical reactions in living matter
but without appearing in the final product. Enzymes
are, therefore, catalysts. Hydrochloric acid can act as
a catalyst, for it will reduce cane-sugar to glucose
and fructose. At the end there will be just as much
hydrochloric acid as before, ready to break down a
new batch of sugar.
The commonest enzyme-catalyst of all is zymase,
produced by yeast. It is the zymase that enables yeast
to make quick work of fermenting sugar to alcohol
and carbon dioxide. In a cell enzymes are for ever
building up and breaking down compounds, thus
aiding in the process we call living. There are many
enzymes, and each performs one particular task only.
Just as a key fits only one lock, so a given enzyme acts
only on a given substance.
There is little use in continuing the Frankensteinian
experiment. Not enough is known about enzymes.
They have much to do with converting the food that a
cell eats into energy. Like a boiler and a steam-engine,
a cell traffics in energy. Coal is potential energy; so is
the food on which cells and human beings thrive. The
crudest kind of synthetic life, even cruder than proto-
plasm, will perhaps prove to be an organic compound
which will absorb energy from the outside with the
aid of a few enzymes and give up carbon dioxide, very
much as if it were a microscopic boiler furnace.
Baffling as are the difficulties that confront the
scientist who seeks to penetrate the secret of life,
they may be no more formidable than those which
152 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
physical chemists had to overcome before they could
discover that the atom, so far from being the smallest
unit of matter, is in itself a system composed of a
nucleus and of outer electrons. X-rays and radio-
activity were the clues that led to the formation of
the electron theory. Possibly some new discovery may
be made about protoplasm, some undivined attribute,
which will lead the biochemist to frame a new theory
of life. * The mystery of life will always remain/
comments Prof Donnan. So will the mystery of
matter, he might add, despite all the proof that has
been accumulated that electrons are realities and that
matter and electricity are one.
Life is energy. The atom is energy. If mathematics
and physical chemistry can tear away the veil that
once enshrouded the mystery of the atom's source of
energy, what may they not do for the exact inter-
pretation of life? They will enable the biochemist
to see the molecules in protoplasm in their proper
relationships, to understand better than he does now
the functions of the enzymes, surface tension, and
other forces that govern the life of a cell, and to
specify on paper just how he must go about the busi-
ness of synthesizing the lowest form of cellular life.
The distinction between life and non-life is not
what it once was. In fact, it has even been proposed
that we should call an atom alive when it is excited
when, for example, it is radiating light. So we find
L. L. Whyte, an English physicist, boldly envisaging
the construction of a synthetic living organism in
CAN THE LABORATORY CREATE LIFE? 153
accordance with the precepts of the electron theory,
largely for the purpose of laying bare the nature of
the problem and the necessity of allowing for the time
clement.
' Could an infinitely wise physicist order the neces-
sary chemicals today and tomorrow put together a
synthetic man ? ' he asks. * If not, why not ? '
He invites us to watch the physicist at work. In a
few moments the physicist has prepared some simple
molecules from their elements. * Now he has com-
pleted the first colloid that he will require, and is start-
ing on his first organic synthesis. But this infinite
wisdom does not give him eternity within a minute,
and we notice that he is getting on more slowly.
While the actual combination of the first molecules
took only about a thousandth of a second, once he
had the apparatus ready the simplest colloid took
about a second. The organic colloid took about a
minute; it seems that nature won't work faster than
that. She has her own rhythm and won't be rushed.
If we wait patiently till the end of the day our friend
may have his first speck of protoplasm, and all the
skill in the world would only have helped him to
make more of it, not to have got any further in his
game of evolution.
' But look at him now ! He is making a hasty calcu-
lation, as though he just realized some great secret of
nature, and knew that he could never create his
homunculus.' And Whyte gives us the imaginary
physicist's table of the estimated minimum time
154 SCIENCE T&AY AND TOMORROW
required by die synthetic processes of nature to attain
various evolutionary stages as follows :
Simple organic compound Simplest unicellular organ-
1/1000 second ism 10 years
Simple colloid i second Flagellate 1000 years
Protein i hour Mammal, including Homo
Primitive protoplasm sapiens 1,000,000 years
i month
Whyte uses the table to point the moral that every
chemical reaction, whether it involves non-living or
living matter, requires time; and the greater the num-
ber of atoms that have to settle down together into
some special arrangement, the greater must be the
time allowed. A laboratory-made man is unthinkable.
The best that the physiological chemist can do is to
create some very low form of life, control its environ-
ment for many generations, and let evolution take its
course.
If man is ever evolved under laboratory glass in this
fashion, hundreds of thousands of years must elapse.
The times given by Whyte, moreover, are theoretical
minima. The period required for evolution to attain
its end is at best a shrewd guess. * Only an Inter-
national Institute of Evolutionary Research under the
most stable League of Nations could hope to create
an artificial man, and even then man could hardly
take the credit, for time would have done more than
man,' says Whyte.
So the best for which we can hope is the creation
CAN THE LABORATORY CREATE LIFE? 155
of simplest unicellular organisms in a theoretical
minimum of ten years. But what excitement when
that first bit of animate albuminous matter begins to
move, to show signs of life ! Telegraph and radio will
flash the news over all the world. On the front page
of every newspaper will appear the startling headline :
' Life Created in Laboratory ! ' And how that arti-
ficial bit of life will be watched ! No royal baby could
be cared for with more devotion. How it takes its
meals, how its behaviour indicates its general well-
being, will be discussed at every breakfast-table.
Chemists will analyse the 'soup' in which it lives to
make sure that it will not be starved to death and
that it will not be poisoned. And when it splits up
into two and thus carries out the simplest of all
processes of reproduction, there will be more broad-
casting, more headlines, more learned, scientific
monographs. Chemistry will have achieved its greatest
triumph.
XL Evolution since Darwin
ON SEPTEMBER 1 6, 1835, CHARLES DARWIN LANDED FROM
the warship Beagle on the Chatham Islands in the
Galapagos Archipelago, which lies some 5oo-odd miles
west of America under the Equator. ' By far the most
important event in my life/ he wrote in his notebook,
the one which 'has determined my whole career'.
It was in the Galapagos that Darwin saw the great
truth of evolution unfolded the dovetailing of
species and varieties into one grand scheme which
embraced the lowliest things that grow and crawl and
the highest type of civilized man. The theory of
natural selection had still to be developed, but the
train of thought that led to it had been started.
Biology has undoubtedly expanded since the Beagle
made her famous voyage; it has become more and
more an experimental science. Mendel's laws of here-
dity provide a working formula for the plant and
animal breeder. Chromosomes and genes have been
discovered the counterparts in biology of molecules
and atoms in chemistry. Mutations (variations from
existing species) have been artificially produced. Lastly,
the mathematician has entered the field and thrown
a flood of light on the manner in which species sustain
themselves in the struggle for existence and in which
they survive. What has been the effect on Darwin's
doctrine? Where does the theory of natural selection
stand today ?
If evolution is a fact, something must make an
animal or plant evolve. Lamarck decided that it must
be looked for in the animal or plant itself. He thought
157
158 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
that organisms must respond to an inner impulse or
urge of some kind. A fowl takes to water because of
new necessities or opportunities and tries to paddle.
The urge for webbed feet is thus aroused. Not only
this, but the tendency towards webbing, the desire to
paddle, would be not only transmitted but intensified.
'Use inheritance' is the technical name for the process.
There is also a 'disuse inheritance'.
Darwin arrived at a different conception. He had
studied the ways of breeders. In fact, he did some
experimenting with plants on his own account.
Always there was variation from the parents. But there
was also close resemblance. Strong, heavy draught
horses sprang from strong, heavy sires and dams. The
breeders saw to that and deliberately prevented what
were to them mismatings. So with pigs, sheep, cattle,
and dogs. 'Artificial selection', Darwin called the
process. Was there a similar ruthless weeding out of
undesirable plants and animals in the forest and the
sea? He read Malthus, and the truth flashed on him.
Malthus presented evidence to show that popula-
tions increase more rapidly than the food supply.
Hence there must be starvation and death. Who
starves and dies? Naturally the weak. Populations
must therefore reach a point of equilibrium. Is a
similar influence at work in nature? Even a slow-
breeding animal like the elephant would overrun the
earth if death did not intervene to cut him off. Lack
of food, physical defects, any one of a hundred un-
favourable traits might prove to be his vndoing. Un-
EVOLUTION SINCE DARWIN 159
favourable for what? Life in the jungle. Very subtly
and imperceptibly, then, nature was selecting the fit.
Each generation was thus mercilessly put to the test.
Only the right variation of an elephant, parrot, mos-
quito, oak or grass could survive.
The contrast between the conceptions of Lamarck
and Darwin is evident. According to Lamarck, a
creature must will and strive to evolve; according to
Darwin it must do or die. Haeckel saw no inconsis-
tency in the two views and dedicated his History of
Creation to both Lamarck and Darwin. And even the
great Darwin himself accepted 'use inheritance' as a
partial explanation of the process of evolution when-
ever it suited his purpose.
Before we can appraise Darwin we must understand
what he meant by natural selection. He decided that
new species arose through random variation the
appearance of some slight peculiarity which was not
found in the parents and which was transmitted to
later generations. Did natural selection cause the
species to vary ? Or did it simply test chance variations
and peculiarities and destroy those that were unsuit-
able to the environment, such as legless lions or eye-
less insects?
The Origin of Species is one of the clearest books on
a new theory ever written. Yet it is difficult to discover
just how Darwin thought that new species originated.
The variations had to be slight, and they had to occur
at random. Sometimes he meant variations that are
bodily differences, known to be without significance
l6o SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
in evolution (like the hothouse forcing that produces
large grapes), and sometimes differences that were the
result of some inner urge like that pictured by
Lamarck. When it came to explaining how natural
selection, the struggle for existence, could both choke
off the unfit and initiate new species, he could speak
but vaguely of 'a strong principle of inheritance'.
There is virtually no evidence that weeding out the
unfit creates anything in nature. A reaping-machine
cannot account for the sprouting of new grass or the
direction in which it will grow or the shape of its
blades. There is no solid proof that the mere struggle
for existence, unless we invoke the discredited La-
marck, can launch a change.
An experimental biologist of our day could raise at
least a hundred pertinent objections to the theory of
natural selection. Among the more important would
be these :
First Some species have died out in one place but
not in other places. In the absence of any change in the
environment, why should this be so ?
Second There is no relationship between the lethal
factors (disease, weather, enemies) and advantageous
qualities. Death strikes at the adapted and unadapted
indifferently. Dewar, a naturalist who studied the
selective elimination of birds in India, reached this
conclusion : ' The individuals which survive longest
in the struggle for existence are the lucky ones rather
than the most fit.'
Third The differences supposed to account for
EVOLUTION SINCE DARWIN l6l
survival are not sufficiently of the life-and-death kind.
It is nonsense to pretend that a bird will refuse to eat
a worm which is just beginning to acquire a bad taste.
So with the case for mimicry. The departure must be
marked to be of any use. If it is too marked it usually
does not survive.
Fourth Variations may be harmful or worthless in
the struggle for existence. Why are they not killed off
promptly? Why, for instance, did nature take the
trouble to evolve unwieldy dinosaurs over countless
centuries ?
Fifth Natural selection ought to be reversible
when the environment reverses. The phenomenon has
not yet been observed.
Sixth Only slight variations are supposed to play
an important part in evolution. Where is the positive
proof that this is so ?
Seventh The time when death occurs is usually
ignored by natural selectionists. Natural selection must
take its toll at a suitable age. But do selective deaths
occur at the right age ?
Eighth If variation is a random process, as Darwin
assumed, the origin of a variation can have no relation
to its survival value.
Ninth Evolution, according to Darwin, involves
variation and survival. To say that chance variations
survive because they have been selected is merely to
say that they have survived. It is variation that must
be explained.
Tenth Natural selection implicitly assumes what it
L
162 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
sets out to explain that continuous inheritable varia-
tion occurs constantly in all directions, which it does
not.
We are left exactly where we were when Lamarck
and Darwin were in their heyday left asking our-
selves : Exactly how did the infinite variety of life
come about? How is one species transformed into
another? This is the real issue.
Huxley, Darwin's most ardent and able champion,
told his master that the lack of experimental proof
was the weakest point in his case. And Darwin him-
self once wrote to Huxley : ' If, as I must think,
external conditions produce little effect, what the devil
determines each particular variation? '
We want precisely the kind of experimentation that
has made physics and chemistry exact sciences. Not
until we see variations springing into being, not until
we actually bring them about in the laboratory under
control, not until we behold with our own eyes one
species evolving into another, can we deduce what has
happened to the fishes of the sea, the birds of the air,
the four-footed creatures of the forest in past geological
eras.
While Darwin was startling the world with his
theory of natural selection, an obscure Austrian monk,
the Abbe Gregor Mendel, was actually resorting to
this very method of experiment. Darwin might have
altered his views had he known of the work.
The monk grew sweet-peas in his garden, crossed
them this way and that under the strictest control, and
EVOLUTION SINCE DARWIN 163
at kst formulated the now famous Mendelian laws of
heredity. He presented his discovery in a paper read
before an obscure society in Briinn, in 1865. In the
transactions of that body it slumbered for thirty-five
years until the beginning of the present century.
Then de Vries in the Netherlands, Correns in Ger-
many, and Tschermak in Austria independently and
almost simultaneously formulated the same laws after
conducting breeding experiments.
It was de Vries who first developed the discovery
of the manner in which variations are transmitted.
The evidence showed that the variations mutants,
in technical parlance appear suddenly. Intransigent
Darwinians were dazed. They had been taught to
believe that there was nothing sudden about the pro-
cesses of evolution. To be sure de Vries saw in this
nothing inconsistent with natural selection and re-
mained a staunch adherent of Darwin all his life.
After the effect of the first shock had worn off, and
more experimenting had been conducted, it turned out
that the variations or mutations were promptly killed
off if they were too marked. Nature has no use for
monstrosities. Only the slightly abnormal plants and
animals survive, breed true, and transmit the abnor-
malities. Back we are again to Darwin. He may have
been right in holding that only the small differences
count. But he was wrong in thinking that evolution
is a continuous process involving all the members of a
generation.
In Darwin's time most naturalists were convinced
164 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
that noses and eyes, arms and legs were inherited as
such that cabbages and kings transmitted themselves
as whole collections of features and parts. After the
revolution brought about by the rediscovery of Men-
del's laws and the work of de Vries, Correns, Tscher-
mak, Bateson, Cuenot, Morgan, and scores of other
hard-headed pragmatists, it was evident that a living
body is built up like a house from given materials in
accordance with an invisible set of blue-prints. The
changes that do occur in plants and animals are dic-
tated by what happens in the egg.
Weismann, one of Darwin's staunchest adherents,
suspected all this. So did Darwin, for that matter, if
we read some of his definitions of variation correctly.
Weismann chopped off rats' tails for scores of genera-
tions. But always the tails grew in the offspring. He
performed other experiments which showed that no
matter how an organism was mutilated the effect was
nil on subsequent generations. So he preached the
doctrine of germ plasm the doctrine that the germ
cells or eggs are not the product of the body in which
they are found but of the germ cells or eggs of the
previous generation.
Within the cells Weismann and others saw little
bodies now called 'chromosomes' literally 'colour
bodies' because they can be easily stained and thus
made visible under the microscope. But the chromo-
somes were not the ultimate units. Within the chro-
mosomes lie the real determiners. Like the atom the
determiners of new varieties must be inferred. They
EVOLUTION SINCE DARWIN 165
cannot be seen even with the most powerful micro-
scope. Genes they are called.
With the inspiration of genius Thomas Hunt
Morgan decided to experiment with the now famous
Drosophila melanogaster, a fruit-fly that breeds a new
generation every nine days. In a single year he could
study twenty-five generations or the equivalent of
500 years of human family life. If germ plasm could
be modified, fruit-flies would tell the story in their
aberrations from their ancestors.
With a patience buoyed only by the stimulus of a
great idea, Morgan bred flies by the millions and kept
a carefully indexed Almanack de Gotha of their chil-
dren and their children's children. No human family
is as sure of its ancestry as he is of his fruit-flies'
progenitors. He and his school examined more than
20,000,000 flies and found about 400 mutants that
bred true. Today more than 600 mutants are
known.
Morgan assumed that the genes of the male chromo-
somes exactly matched the genes of the female chro-
mosomes. Thus the genes that control wing shape in
one chromosome lie opposite the corresponding genes
in the other chromosome. So with the matching genes
that determine eye colour, length of hair, and the
hundreds of other attributes of a fruit-fly, a bird, a
cow, a man. Genes crossed over from one chromo-
some to the other, the children receiving them from
both father and mother. At last it became apparent
why children are so like their parents. And crossing
l66 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
and recrossing also explained why children depart
from their grandparents.
In the process attributes can be combined in differ-
ent ways. So we inherit from our parents not noses
and eyes as we inherit real estate or money the belief
in Darwin's time but genes. There can be no doubt
of their existence. There must be 2000 to 2500, then,
strung along like beads, each different from every
other in a string, each playing its own role in the
highly complicated economy of the cell.
But not yet had it been proved experimentally that
the genes are actually the units of heredity. There
now began ingenious efforts to jolt the genes change
their constitution and arrangement. The experimen-
ters tried everything drugging, poisoning, intoxica-
tion, anaesthetics, bright lights, utter darkness, suffo-
cation, whirling in centrifugal machines, mechanical
shaking, mutilation, heating, chilling, starving, over-
feeding. In vain.
Then Prof H. J. Muller decided to adopt the
methods of the atomic physicists. If, he reasoned,
X-rays can tear an electron from an atom and thus
convert it into so very excited a bit of matter that it
glows, what if they were turned on the genes?
The result was startling. What actually happened
is not yet clear. Apparently the genes were either
changed chemically or shifted out of their places
perhaps both. Instead of 400 mutants in 20,000,000
Muller got 150 times as many. He had accelerated the
evolutionary process 15,000 per cent. And what mon-
EVOLUTION SINCE DARWIN 167
strosities! Flies with eyes that bulged, flies with eyes
that were sunken; flies with purple, white, green,
brown, and yellow eyes; flies with hair that was curly,
ruffled, parted, fine, coarse; flies that were bald; flies
with extra legs or antennae or no legs or antennae;
flies with wings of every conceivable shape or with
virtually no wings at all; big flies and little flies; active
flies and sluggish flies; sterile flies and fertile flies.
What had happened? * The roots of life the genes
had indeed been struck and had yielded,' in the
words of Muller. Could there be any doubt after this
that genes exist? Or that the method whereby the
differences that distinguish one generation of organ-
isms from its predecessors are inherited is at last
revealed? Or that differences in genes do arise sud-
denly to bring about large variations?
The problem of evolution narrows down to the
gene. We are now at the rock-bottom of life, but still
unable to explain how new species originate. There is
reason to suppose that the genes are simply highly
complex chemical substances. This merely shifts the
direction of inquiry and speculation. How did these
substances, these genes, come together? Through
accident or design? If they are mere chemicals, how
is it that they change and perpetuate themselves,
whereas iron, gold, other matter, on the whole remain
what they are?
The next step is to fathom the chemistry of the
gene. Not until that is done will the evolutionary
process become clearer and such terms as 'acquired
l68 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
characters', 'use inheritance', 'natural selection', 'sur-
vival of the fit', 'struggle for existence', be stripped
of their mysticism. We have only been romancing in
what we thought was a scientific fashion and, by
giving names to mysterious activities, deceiving our-
selves into believing that we understood them.
Already it is evident that the problem of the gene
is the problem of the atom. This being so, the physi-
cist who studies the constitution of matter and the
biochemist who studies genes and why they vary
chemically and thus give rise to new forms of life,
will ultimately find themselves confronted by the same
phenomena. For the problem of the evolutionary
process is not merely the problem of life. It is the
problem of the cosmos itself.
XII. Carrel
AMID EIGHTEEN LINDBERGH PERFUSION PUMPS IN THE
Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, each en-
closing a vital organ or piece of tissue, officiates
Dr Alexis Carrel, high priest of biology. White-clad
women enter, glance at a pump occasionally, cast a
practised eye on a living morsel, and leave. They look
like nurses, act like nurses. In fact, this room is a
hospital, a new type of hospital, where livers, spleens,
kidneys and ovaries are patients.
Born at Sainte-Foy-les-Lyon, in France, Carrel was
only seventeen when he was graduated with a bache-
lor's degree at the University of Lyons. He turned at
once to medicine and received his M.D. from the uni-
versity's medical school in 1900. Fables were told of
his surgical dexterity even in his student days. One
of them which attributes to him the ability to tie
knots in a match-box with three fingers makes him
laugh.
' Even if I could perform this trick there are women
among my assistants who can do better,' he com-
ments. ' With a needle they can split a sheet of paper
into two sheets without tearing it.'
At any rate, his experience and knowledge was such
that he was invited to join the faculty of the Univer-
sity of Chicago in 1905. A year later he entered the
Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. There the
rest of his work has been done, with the exception of
that in the war years, which found him in charge of
a base hospital at Compiegne, in France, not only
saving lives with the famous Carrel-Dakin solution
169
170 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
but also studying the healing of wounds and fractures.
Behind Carrel lies forty years of ruminating on life,
of glimpsing it in its simplest forms through micro-
scopes, of incredibly delicate surgical operations on
tissues and organs. He has travelled far. His un-
rivalled skill, his ingenious techniques have achieved
triumphs that would have seemed as wildly incredible
to the men who taught him biology and surgery in
the University of Lyons as a medieval tale of some
alchemist's homunculus seems to us.
Curiosity is supposed to be the driving force of
science. No doubt it is. But 'curiosity', as we use the
term, implies a toying with instruments and materials
as if the scientist did no more than say : * Now let's
fire protons at lithium with a million volts and see
what happens.' Much science is necessarily of that
kind. But not Carrel's. For more than forty years his
has had but one purpose, but one direction. From
the beginning he decided that he would study life
as life and not infer what he could about it from
death lifeless cells, bloodless muscles. Or, as he
puts it, * structure and function are one and insepar-
able.'
The man who reasoned and wrote most eloquently
and effectively about the futility of reaching sound
conclusions about life from mere meat, either in the
mass or in minute transparent slices studied under a
microscope, was the great French physiologist Claude
Bernard. A living animal is not merely a collection
of cells and organs, each with a structure and function
CARREL
of its own, he taught. It is a whole, a beautifully
integrated mechanism. Bernard insisted that every
organ has its 'internal milieu'. Structure, function,
environment, these are a unity. They should be
studied as a unity. Schwann, the German, said the
same about the cell. A gutted fish on the kitchen table
is not the same fish that once swam in water. So with
excised tissues and organs.
Carrel was eighteen when Bernard's conception of
the internal environment illuminated everything and
crystallized his own doubts about the validity of
classical biology's methods. A new approach was
needed. Surgery, chemistry, physics, cytology, medi-
cine, anatomy twenty sciences must be welded into
one science to study a living thing, whether an organ
or an animal.
To be convinced that the traditional approach was
wrong is one thing; to evolve the techniques of a new
one, another. Carrel began with wounds and fractures
as a medical student. He was struck by the fact that
dressings only keep out bacteria. They have no direct
influence on the healing process. Why do some
wounds and fractures close and knit more rapidly
than others?
He became interested in surgery. As a surgeon he
had to study blood-vessels. From blood-vessels he
passed on to the mechanism of healing. Even then he
thought it might be possible to cut out tissues, keep
them alive, transplant them successfully to a medium
which would be the equivalent of the old environ-
172 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
ment. And then substitute facts for theories and
speculations.
His experiments led him to the conclusion that toxic
wastes must be removed wastes that poison if cells
and tissues are to be kept alive. That conclusion was
to be strengthened in later years. Then he read of
Prof Ross Harrison's work at Yale great work that
caused the scales to fall from biological eyes all over
the world. That was in 1908.
Harrison wanted to know whether nerve fibres
grow only out of nerve cells in the spinal cord or
whether they can grow from any cells in the body.
He dissected a few nerve cells from the spinal cord
of an embryo tadpole. With the utmost precaution
against infection he put them in a drop of the clear
part of frog's blood and sealed the whole in a minute
glass chamber which he could scrutinize under a
microscope. Before his eyes the nerve fibres grew out
of the nerve cells. The conclusion was obvious. The
nerves that make a big toe twitch have grown several
feet from a cell in the spinal cord near the hip. Tissue
culture was born as a science.
Carrel was deeply impressed. Here was Claude
Bernard's dream become a reality. A little nerve cell
in the right environment could be studied alive for
a few hours, just as if it were in the body. It was a
triumph of technique. Carrel realized that he must
become a better technician. Possibly he is the greatest
technician of our time.
What technique means to Carrel may be gleaned
CARREL 173
from the mere externals of his procedure. He robes
himself and his assistants in black to avoid reflections.
Even the hoods that cover heads are black, revealing
only the eyes. The room is windowless. No shadows
are cast by the light overhead. Tables are draped in
black cloths. Furniture is black. No hospital operat-
ing-room is so speckless, so dustless, so germless.
Imagine him back in January 1912. He takes a
nine-day-old fertilized egg from an incubator, washes
it, sterilizes it, cautiously cracks the shell, lifts out the
unborn chick, lays it on a sterile base, skilfully excises
its fleck of a beating heart. How long can it live out-
side of the body in the right medium?
The environment is ready. Days before he had pre-
pared it. Embryonic chicken juice. He had cut up,
ground, mashed an embryo until he had a pulp, and
then he had mixed the pulp with a solution of salt to
preserve it. Next he had whirled the juice out of the
mixture just as cream is whirled out of milk in a
centrifugal separator.
Snipping off a bit of heart only eight-hundredths of
an inch square, he transfers it with a certain preciosity
to a drop of clotted, but clear, chicken-blood plasma.
An additional drop of embryonic juice and the speck
of heart is left to itself, properly protected. The tissue
has been encased in its environment. There structure
and function can interplay.
Two days later the microscopic fleck has doubled in
size. It is cut in two with a blade only a tenth of an
inch long and is bathed to wash away the killing
1 74 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
wastes. Quickly the retained bit of tissue is transferred
to a new drop of plasma incorporated with fresh
embryonic juice.
The culture lives on and on to prove that cells need
not die if they are fed and their wastes are removed.
Nurses trained by Carrel watch over the culture. It
has its microscopic ailments. Perhaps it needs a bath;
perhaps a change of diet; perhaps a period of fasting.
The vestal virgins who guard this living flame know.
A hundred years hence their descendants may also
be standing over the culture, performing the same
surgical and aseptic rites. It may be destined to survive
an indefinite number of attendants.
There is something frightening about the way the
cells grow by self-division. In a year a microscopic bit
of heart would be thirteen quadrillion times bigger
than the sun if half the growth were not cut away and
if it were theoretically possible to keep all cells alive
as they divide and divide and divide. The excretions
that kill seem a blessing.
In no other laboratory has this exploit been repeated
over a period of time so long. The explanation is
technical perfection, unflagging vigilance, the utmost
refinement in asepsis. As for the embryonic chicken
juice, biologists regard it as a stroke of genius. It was
as natural to Carrel to think of it as it is to think of
water as the only world in which a fish can live. Is it
not part of the natural environment?
Nothing reveals the quality of Carrel's mind better
than the lessons that he draws from his seemingly
CARREL 175
immortal culture. It grows but does not age. With
organs it is different. With them more than mere
growth is involved. Chemical changes take place in
the internal environment, the fluids that feed and
bathe. Ageing is part of an organ's life.
What, then, is time? This is a very practical ques-
tion to Carrel. He speaks of 'physiological time',
which has nothing in common with the absolute time
ticked off by the clock or marked by the calendar.
We feel it ourselves. To a boy, time drags; to an old
man, it flies. It is inseparable from life.
To drive home the significance of physiological time
Carrel refers to the experiments made by the late Prof
Jacques Loeb of the Rockefeller Institute. That emi-
nent biologist hatched fruit-flies and kept specimens
of the same batch at different temperatures. At 50
degrees Fahrenheit, about the temperature of the
lower part of a kitchen refrigerator, flies lived 177
days, or nearly six months; at room temperature (68
degrees), 54 days; at 86 degrees, only 21 days.
Age as a function of absolute time means nothing
in interpreting these varying spans of life. How old
were these three groups of flies in terms of their own
bodies? The batch kept at low temperature was still
young long after the high-temperature batch had
flourished and died. Just as relativists treat time as a
fourth dimension and speak of space-time, so Carrel
speaks of growth-time or life-time. Growth, life arc
part of time. Is time part of the environment?
To a man who thinks thus, a successful experiment
176 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
with a segment of chicken heart is only a beginning.
The culture told nothing about the time-process, noth-
ing about growing old, because it did not grow old
itself. Whole living organs would have to be studied
in especially invented glass bodies.
Long before Colonel Lindbergh appeared on the
scene Carrel had begun to experiment with so-called
'heart pumps', highly ingenious inventions of the
instrument-makers of the Rockefeller Institute. They
were not wholly satisfactory. It seemed impossible to
keep out the germs that kill.
The Colonel turned up at the Rockefeller Institute
brought there by Dr Paluel Flagg, perhaps the fore-
most anaesthetist in the country, organizer of the
Society for the Prevention of Asphyxial Death, the
man who was Mrs Lindbergh's anaesthetist when her
first child was born. Lindbergh saw perfusion pumps
at work splashing 'blood' over organs, learned how
hard it is to keep out bacteria, asked intelligent
questions.
Carrel has his own way of judging human beings
by a process of intuition which is beyond describing.
Some current of understanding passed between the
biologist and the aviator. Carrel cannot explain what
happened. He was impressed by the Colonel; the
Colonel by him. From that moment perfusion pumps
became as much an obsession with the Colonel as
airplanes.
The perfusion pump consists of three superposed
glass chambers. In the top one rests the organ to be
CARREL 177
studied. A liquid, which is both food and blood, is
rhythmically splashed over the organ by air-pressure,
collected by the central chamber, where the pressure
is equalized, and then permitted to run back to a
reservoir chamber. Compressed air furnishes the driv-
ing force of the operative mechanism. A rotary valve
causes the air to act on the liquid pulses. There are no
moving parts other than the valve.
The organ needs 'air' as well as blood. Hence gases
are supplied. To keep out germs the tubes through
which they pass are stuffed with cotton. What the
system of heart and lungs still needs is some way
to remove wastes, a sort of artificial kidney. When
that is devised it will probably be possible to keep
organs in glass much longer than the present thirty
days.
It is difficult to estimate the value of the Colonel's
contribution to Carrel's crowning achievement. Carrel
gives him all the credit.
There is no doubt about the success of the Colonel's
pump. Hundreds of organs have been kept alive with-
in its sterile glass bulbs from two to thirty days
hearts, lungs, livers, spleens, reproductive organs. The
hearts beat on, the glands secrete hormones, organs
function just as they do within the bodies from which
they were dissected. Here is the culmination of forty
years of experimenting, self-perfection, philosophiz-
ing. Some day it may be possible to repeat the success
of the chicken heart on a higher scale and to behold
a kidney or a pancreas secreting fluids long beyond
M
178 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
the span of a human life. Alexander's dust stopping
a bung-hole? Why not his heart beating on for
ever?
'Medical engineering' this new development may
be called. It is of as much importance in the progress
of medicine as Pasteur's discoveries. Pathology is at
present only a descriptive science. It tells what has
happened to a tissue or an organ not how or why
anything happened. The time has come to experiment
with living organs as if they were carburettors or
differentials in an automobile. Carrel himself modi-
fies the chemical composition of the 'blood' that circu-
lates within the glass 'body' of a thyroid or kidney
adds insulin, adrenalin, hormones, and sees how
the chemical and physical activity of the organ
responds. Claude Bernard's dream is realized in a
small way. Vital organs and their environment are
studied together as units.
How do the thyroids, pituitary, pineal, adrenals, and
other glands secrete the hormones that differentiate us
from one another determine whether we shall be
idiots or geniuses, giants or dwarfs, men or women,
dynamos of energy or sloths ? There is hope of answer-
ing, now that glands can be observed at work. What
is the relation of heart to kidneys, of ovaries to milk-
producing breasts, of one organ to another? How do
organs degenerate when they are attacked by disease ?
The pathologist of the future may watch the progress
of Bright's disease, of tuberculosis in a piece of lung,
of endocarditis in a heart, of arteries hardening.
CARREL 179
At last the process of ageing can be studied in blood
and tissues. Carrel has already convinced himself that
if only we can rid ourselves of toxic products most of
us may hope to live a century and more. It may take
fifteen years, a generation, perhaps longer, to accumu-
late the facts that medicine needs. The end must be
not only new ways of protecting the human organism
against disease, but also positive ways of improving the
quality of tissues and blood. Carrel once told the New
York Academy of Medicine that some day it may be
possible to put men in hibernating storage, activate
them, return them to storage, so that they may live
several centuries. * The Utopias of today arc the
realities of tomorrow.' He wants an institute dedicated
to the process of ageing the investigation of the
chemical, physical, and physiological changes that take
place from the cradle to the grave, especially in the
blood.
But Carrel has an outlook far wider than that of a
medical engineer. All his life he has been a synthetic
philosopher. To him man cannot be understood
merely by understanding how his cells, tissues, and
organs interact. Mind has hardly been touched. It is
part of the body, not a separate entity. The separation
of mind and body the old duality of Descartes
sweeps it away. To Carrel it is as meaningless as a side
of beef hanging from a hook, so far as explaining the
process of living is concerned. Yes, mind and body are
one. And the environment is part of the unity, just as
blood is part of any organ. Why not include the
l8o SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
universe? A synthesis which embraces the outer
nebulae and the human kidney, cells and cities,
thyroid glands and totalitarianism that might satisfy
Carrel.
He looks at man with hope rather than disapproval,
but is sure that we have misdirected our inquiries. It
is not enough for science to give us health and com-
fort. Our progress has been made in machines rather
than in men. Our science is too analytic. It tears man
apart and hands pieces of him over to the specialists
chemists, anatomists, pathologists, ethnologists,
psychologists, physicists, physiologists. He thinks that
we cannot progress much farther in this way. Look at
the result. We have health and comfort. We have
created an extraordinary, artificial environment for
man which has had terrible effects. But man no one
has attempted to change him yet. So we behold Carrel
plunging into sociology as well as a study of tissues,
organs, and environments. Nothing short of a super-
man with a supersoul will do for him. Especially
important is the supersoul. Hence his preoccupation
with religion, telepathy, and matters at which most
scientists look askance. Where man is concerned,
everything matters to Carrel.
The physicists and some philosophers dismiss all
this as metaphysical moonshine. His achievements
speak for themselves. The piece of chicken heart that
lives on in the Rockefeller Institute, a proof that cells
and environment, structure and function, cannot be
separated that came out of moonshine. The organs
CARREL l8l
that live thirty days in Lindbergh's pump and again
prove the unity of structure and function and environ-
ment that, too, carne out of moonshine. Let us have
more moonshine.
XIII. Man and His World
MAN RUSHES THROUGH THE AIR IN PASSENGER PLANES AT
speeds of more than 150 miles an hour and dreams of
rocket ships that will whisk him across the Atlantic
between breakfast and luncheon. He rises miles into
the stratosphere, where oxygen must be inhaled from
a tank if he is to retain consciousness. He drills and
blasts for gold in South Africa in a gallery dank with
the steam of hot springs, and in steel-mills he handles
metal which is so much liquid fire. He huddles in
cities of stone and steel, there to fall a prey to germs of
which he knew nothing in his primitive hunting life
of a few thousand years ago. Upon his eyes and his
ears sights and sounds impinge that wear down his
nerves. He creates an artificial environment for him-
self and in it lives an artificial life. Clothes, lights,
rooms, plumbing, steam-heat, cooked food, dishes,
knives and forks, even the atmosphere in an air-
conditioned theatre, hotel, or ship everything is arti-
ficial. He is as much a forced product as a hothouse
grape. Can this primitive savage, who only ten
thousand years ago kept body and soul together by
trapping and stoning forest animals and spearing fish,
stand the nervous strain of the machine world that
he has fashioned for himself? Ever since Darwin's
day physiologists and anatomists have had their
doubts. Latterly the doubts are more audible than
ever.
At a recent congress of the American College of
Surgeons, Dr R. C. Buerki, past president of the
American Hospital Association, presented a picture of
184 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
this modern man, a victim of high blood-pressure,
enlarged heart, failing circulation, jangled nerves
afflictions brought about by inventions that make it
possible to do several things at the same time, such as
gulping down more food in five minutes than a Zulu
can gather in a day and listening to broadcast jazz or
reading a newspaper. And in a course of the Terry
lectures delivered at Yale the Nobel prize-winner, Sir
Joseph Barcroft, showed how delicate is the balance
between mind and body and how quickly the mind
succumbs when the conditions under which the body
naturally thrives are only slightly changed. At the 1936
meeting of the British Association for the Advance-
ment of Science the distinguished palaeontologist Prof
H. L. Hawkins dubbed man 'the only irrational
creature'. And at the Harvard Tercentenary the
specialists in nervous disorders made it plain that the
pace set by our machines is too fast for the harassed
organism.
The glory and the curse of man are his brain. It
raises him above the beasts of the field and the forest,
but it also dooms him as a species. For that brain of his
is overdeveloped, overspecialized. It endows him with
a mind that conceives new machines to take the place
of muscles, new instruments to supplement inadequate
senses, new and more complex ways of living in com-
munities. The poor body cannot adapt itself rapidly
enough to the social and technical changes conceived
by the mind. Heart and muscles belong to the jungle;
the modern mind to an environment of its own crea-
MAN AND HIS WORLD 185
tion. The verdict seems to be that man must crack
under the strain.
First we consider the story told by the fossil bones
of creatures that once possessed the earth and then
vanished. They scream Cassandra prophecies.
' We developed now this organ and now that to
secure an advantage over our enemies in the struggle
for existence,' they warn. ' See how some of us in-
creased our speed, others waxed stronger and larger,
and still others practised the art of mimicry in adapt-
ing ourselves to the environment. All in vain. One by
one we perished.'
They ask ominous questions these bones. * Where
are the first things that crawled out of the sea ? Where
are the pterodactyls hugest creatures that ever flew?
Where are the dinosaurs that once shook the earth?
Where are the common ancestors of apes and men?
Where, for that matter, are the first, crude men of
Java, China, Rhodesia, and England, the half-apes that
ruled the forest a million years ago? Where are the
Neanderthalers and Cro-Magnons of only fifty thou-
sand years ago ? '
The bones preach sermons on the virtues of sim-
plicity. On the whole it is the simple organisms that
endure the one-celled organisms best of all. These
are not brilliant, clever specialists, but biological
jacks-of-all-trades. Not that complexity and specializa-
tion are necessarily fatal. They are merely highly
dangerous. The lowly things are harmonious wholes.
Introduce specialization a more efficient way of
l86 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
gathering and devouring food, a surer hold on a rock
or tree, a nervous system more responsive to the
dangers of the environment and the old harmony is
impaired, the road to extinction cleared. When man
learned how to use his mind, more was involved than
the mere development of reasoning power. Stories
have been written by Wells and others of super-
intellectual ants that defeated man and assumed
ascendancy. Good fiction, but bad biology. Man had
to pass through a creepy, slimy, slithery, finny, furry
past before he could acquire his complex central
nervous system and his brain. He came out of the
oyster and the starfish, the shark and the tiger, the
cow and something from which he and the ape sprang.
Each upward step was marked by an important
physical change a better co-ordination of mind and
body. The foot and the hand of a chimpanzee, man's
nearest lower relative, are different in structure and
even in function from our feet and hands. Jaws, brow,
teeth are different in structure, too. Adapting himself
to an upright position, acquiring the art of walking on
two feet instead of four, making a clutching and
holding tool of the hand all this was accompanied by
the evolution of the brain, the most complicated single
piece of apparatus in the world.
Apparently this rise from the oyster is not yet
ended. Moreover, it has not been a uniform process.
Sometimes it was this organ that shot ahead, some-
times that. The central nervous system, of which the
brain is the vertex, has outstripped all else. Man is an
MAN AND HIS WORLD 187
overspecialized animal by reason of his brain. And
it is overspecialization that dooms him to ultimate
extinction.
Surveying man with a critical eye, the late Prof
Elie Metchnikoff of the Pasteur Institute found him
anything but the piece of work that Hamlet held up
for admiration. What is the good of hair? asked the
Russian derogator. It catches germs; it is a vestige of
the ape within us. Look at the caecum (blind gut, in
yeoman's English) and the large intestine. Utterly use-
less. Mere cesspools. Cut them out, was MetchnikofTs
advice surgical operations actually performed with
success. Then there is the eye. We might overlook the
optical mistakes made in its design and construction
if only it would maintain its efficiency. At forty-five
the lens is already old. Walking on two feet has
brought with it fallen arches, varicose veins; a now
illogical distribution of valves in the circulatory sys-
tem, congested livers and a hundred other lapses from
physical perfection. Man as a social animal needs
correction and improvement. The surgeon is helpless.
Speed up evolution, was the conclusion reached by the
great Russian rebel against nature. Unless that is done
man must fall a victim to his own brain and works.
The strain upon the nervous system is as nothing
compared with that to come if the engineers and
inventors maintain the present pace. Utopians like
Prof H. }. Muller predict that each of us will some
day be in potentially immediate communication with
everyone on earth. Can the race stand it? Even the
1 88 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
prospect of more speed terrifies a physiologist such as
Barcroft. ' What of the accidents that befall aeronauts
in pursuit of records? ' he asks. 'It is the human
element which gives way, and it is not the body of
man but his mind.'
Metchnikoll is not alone. Anatomists, physiologists,
palaeontologists agree with him on the whole. Listen
to Sir Arthur Keith :
Beyond a doubt civilization is submitting the
human body to a vast and critical experiment. Civil-
ization has laid bare some of the wea\ points in the
human body, but the conditions which have provoked
them are not of nature's ordaining but of man's
choosing.
And next to Dr Charles B. Davenport, geneticist
of the Carnegie Institution of Washington :
Apparently man is to be compared with the great
horny and armoured dinosaurs, the great el\, and
many fossil nautili in which an exaggeration of a part
was followed by extinction. . . .
Inherent laws of mutation and evolutionary change
will work themselves out and man will in time go the
way of all other species.
And lastly, Prof H. L. Hawkins, speaking in 1936
before the British Association for the Advancement
of Science :
MAN AND HIS WORLD 189
. . the high cerebral specialization that maizes
possible all these developments and the extraordinary
rate at which success has been attained both point to
the conclusion that this is a species destined to a spec-
tacular rise and an equally spectacular jail, more com-
plete and rapid than the world has yet seen.
Consider now the story told by the physiologist
about a body attuned to the wilderness. For a moment
limit yourself to the blood alone and see what hap-
pens to the mind when its physical and chemical
balance is disturbed ever so slightly.
Overheat the blood, and you rave. Yet men must
work nearly at the raving point in deep, steaming
gold-mines, in hot boiler-rooms, at the mouths of
blazing furnaces, to produce the things demanded in
making an artificial environment.
Chill the blood, as Sir Joseph Barcroft did by lying
naked in an icy room while an assistant watched. For
a time the body tries to combat the cold. Barcroft's
mind told him to get up, walk, keep his blood in
circulation. But he refused for the sake of science.
Then the mind gave up the battle. He stretched out
his legs. He felt warm. ' It was as if I were basking in
the cold/ he says. He was content to lie still, blissfully
indifferent to a death from which his vigilant assistant
saved him. His mind had ceased to watch over him.
Take away oxygen from the blood. The mind loses
in reasoning ability. At 18,000 feet in the Andes,
Barcroft and his assistants suffered from 'mountain
190 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
sickness' a sign of oxygen deficiency. Not a man
thought of inhaling oxygen from cylinders brought
along for just such an emergency. Later in England
Barcroft pedalled a stationary bicycle in a room from
which oxygen was gradually withdrawn. He had
planned to manipulate certain gas valves. Observers
noted the mistakes that he made. Yet he was willing
to swear in court that he had turned the handles
correctly. His mind was beginning to crack.
So with the breathlessness that affects men who fly
at great heights. They suffer not from an affection of
the chest muscles, as they think, but of the nerves that
control the muscles. The central nervous system has
failed to perform its duty.
Decrease the calcium in the blood by half. Convul-
sions, coma, then death follow. Double the calcium.
The blood thickens so that it can hardly flow. Heavi-
ness, indifference, unconsciousness mark successive
stages of the mind's dethronement. Again death is
the end.
Reduce the amount of sugar in the blood ever so
little. There is a feeling of 'goneness', at the worst a
blotting out of the mind. Then death. Increase the
sugar a few milligrams to the cubic centimetre and
fear seizes the mind fear of trifles. Double images
form. Speech is thick. There are illusions.
Blood is slightly alkaline. Acidify it slightly. Coma
follows, meaning that the mind is blank. Make the
blood a little more alkaline. Convulsions foretell the
end.
MAN AND HIS WORLD
Take water from the blood. We collapse from
weakness. Add water. We suffer from headaches,
nausea, dizziness.
Change anything about the blood the amount of
oxygen, carbon dioxide, a score of chemicals and
always the mind gives way. The point is that some of
the diseases that civilization has brought upon us do
affect the physical and chemical constitution of the
blood. Diabetes, for example. So the chemical analysis
of the blood has become an almost indispensable aid
in diagnosing many afflictions. And because it is
indispensable it speaks eloquently of that downfall
which palaeontologists predict.
It may be argued that we do not deliberately inter-
fere with the organism as Barcroft did. But we do.
Divers and tunnellers, for example, must work under
high air-pressure. More gas is driven into the blood-
stream. It cannot be without its physiological effect.
' No doubt/ says Barcroft, ' the thoughts of the
human mind, its power to solve differential equations
or to appreciate exquisite music involves some sort of
physical or chemical pattern, which would be blurred
in a milieu itself undergoing violent changes.' This
means in plain English that a change in the environ-
ment the kind of change that invention dictates
may be too much for body and hence for mind.
Prof Harlow Shapley, a zoologist who became the
distinguished director of Harvard's astronomical ob-
servatory, once tellingly compared the ant with man.
Both are social creatures. But the ant adapted itself
192 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
to its environment 360,000,000 years ago. Volcanoes
have spewed lava, continents have split and floated
apart, ice ages have come and gone, climates have
changed, but the ant has emerged from each cataclysm
unruffled and serene.
Today it is much the same ant that it was geological
epochs ago. It is a highly specialized creature, this
ant. But it subdivides its specialities such matters
as reproduction, working, fighting among castes.
And so it manages to strike a nice balance between
its environment and its social self. It is all but stag-
nant in an evolutionary sense. But it seems to be
permanent.
But man? An unstable thing. A dozen species of
him have been evolved and destroyed in the last mil-
lion years. He is an upstart compared with any social
insect. He has changed his mode of community living
time and time again in the last 25,000 years, but the
ant's social organization has come down intact much
as it was when the earth was younger. If survival is
the test of fitness in the Darwinian sense, we ought
not only to go to the ant and consider her ways but
prostrate ourselves before her. Some day, as Shapley
imagines, an ant will crawl out of the eye-socket
of an extinct man and soliloquize : ' A marvellous
experiment of nature's. What a brain! Alas, the
poor creature did not understand the business of
survival.'
There may be compensation in this rise and decline
of man. If mere survival as a species is the summum
MAN AND HIS WORLD 193
bonum, the ant is indeed the ideal social animal. To
annihilate distance and time with airplanes and radio,
to convert night into day with lamps that are minia-
ture suns, to clothe oneself in fabrics woven from
fibres that nature never knew, to see on the screen
players who enact the events of a purely imaginary
life all this is beyond the unshakable ant. In us a
mind that yearns is at work, but the reward of success-
ful yearning is extinction.
Suppose that man does go the way of the dodo, the
brontosaurus, and the sabre-toothed tiger. Is that the
end of spirituality? Must the world relapse to mere
savagery, just as magnificent cities of ancient Yucatan
and India relapsed to the primeval jungle? Biologists
as a class dislike the notion of purpose and direction in
evolution. Yet it is hard to believe that life is 'but a
disease of matter in its old age', as Sir James Jeans
once hazarded in tracing the evolution of worlds.
Measured in terms of the brain, the trend of evolu-
tion has been up and on. Nature is willing to experi-
ment with countless species, to toss them aside, as
it did thousands of birds, fishes, and four-footed
creatures, but in the end she sees to it that something
better evolves. From her pitiless destruction of pri-
mordial half-apes and of such fine specimens of true
humanity as the Cro-Magnons, it may be inferred that
modern man is a poor thing in her eyes, ready even
now for the scrap-heap. But something else will take
his place if the past is any guide.
Perhaps we are only preliminary sketches, a prepa-
N
194 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
ration for some grander creature, a significant experi-
ment in developing a spirituality higher than the tiger
and the ape within us permit us to achieve. Perhaps
extinction, the price of evolution, is not too high.
XIV. Jove's Competitors
IN THE EARLY DAYS OF ELECTRIC POWER, PUBLIC UTILITY
companies stopped their machinery when a thunder-
storm loomed because of the risk they ran from light-
ning. Interruptions were so common in some cities
that they were not considered news unless trolley-cars
stood motionless for at least a few hours. Most homes
had combination gas and electric fixtures. Farmers'
wives fortunate enough to have electric service were
asked to pull the incoming power-switch lest light-
ning enter over the wires. Candles and oil lamps were
kept for emergencies.
Although no central station of any importance now
stops its machinery during an electric storm such is
the adequacy of the automatic circuit-breakers, oil
switches and insulators introduced in the past few
decades lightning is still a menace, perhaps the only
menace that the electrical engineer fears. In two years
there were 4450 cases of damage by lightning to elec-
trical apparatus in the experience of 165 public utility
companies. With more than ^160,000,000 spent an-
nually for extensions of existing transmission and dis-
tribution systems and for interconnections required to
carry out a vast super-power programme, the problem
of lightning is of such economic consequence that
industrial research was called upon to solve it.
Thus is to be explained the work that has been
done for the past twenty-five years by the research
engineers of the great electrical manufacturing com-
panies. In elaborately equipped experimental stations
record-breaking lightning-strokes of 10,000,000 volts
195
196 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
are generated, measured, and studied. Jove would nod
approval, although the bolts that he hurls have an
average of 100,000,000 volts.
With science compelled to watch these displays
from afar, no wonder that it did much guessing about
them, even after their electrical nature was established
as the result of the practical tests proposed by Frank-
lin. Only by studying lightning in the laboratory, only
by handling it like ordinary current, is it possible to
discover the most effective protection. But who can
predict where lightning will strike? A man might
wait for weeks in the open, with all his measuring
apparatus, before his chance came. And so, like other
engineers who are confronted here and abroad with
the problem of protecting central stations, the research
engineers decided to make their own lightning and
to control the conditions under which it manifests
itself.
Clouds above, earth below charged with elec-
tricity of opposite sign. What could be simpler than
nature's apparatus for the production of lightning?
Electrons pile up until a cloud can hold no more. It
is as if a boiler had burst under a pressure that cannot
be resisted. Electrons are hurled between cloud and
cloud or between cloud and earth in long, branching
flashes. Over and over again the electrons are accumu-
lated, and over and over again there is the same
gradual increase of pressure voltage, in engineering
parlance followed by explosions.
Remembering the majestic scale and the dramatic
JOVE'S COMPETITORS 197
setting of Jove's angry exhibitions, the preparations
for a demonstration of man-made lightning neces-
sarily suffer by comparison. A brick building which
is part of a factory is no substitute for lowering skies
and trees bending in the wind. Yet the General
Electric Company's lightning laboratory at Pittsfield,
Massachusetts, has an air of its own simply because
it is so obviously electrical.
You enter the laboratory through a door marked
'Danger' in the most alarming shade of red that can
be found, and you find yourself in an enormous cube
of a room measuring more than a hundred feet square
by seventy high. In vain you look for anything that
resembles the mechanism of nature. Clouds? There
are none. From the floor two huge wooden frames
studded with shining brown insulators tower to a
height of fifty feet. These, it seems, are the dams that
hold back millions of volts until they are wanted.
Among the insulators are little black boxes, so incon-
spicuous that you have to look hard for them. 'Capaci-
tors', the engineers call the boxes. They are the
'clouds' of the laboratory. Within them the electrons
are stored just as they are in the clouds that swim in
the sky. They are very simple, these artificial clouds.
Merely layers of lead-foil separated by insulating oil.
The electrons collect on the foil and are spilled out
much as they are in real clouds, except that they are
under a certain control.
The current of electricity that lights our lamps and
drives our vacuum-cleaners is a flow of electrons; and
SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
a dynamo an old-fashioned term now is simply a
generator of electrons, a sort of pump that forces them
over wires. The engineer wants pressure, just as we
want it in a pipe to carry water far. Pressure is ex-
pressed in volts. The more pressure, the higher the
voltage. So the electrons from a dynamo or generator
are passed through a transformer, which steps up the
voltage. The process is much like that of reducing
the size of a nozzle on a hose and thus obtaining
a high-pressure jet of water. And from the trans-
formers the electrons rush into the capacitors the
'clouds'.
How conductive air may be depends on the humid-
ity. It takes more volts, more pressure, to make light-
ning leap through dry than through wet air. That
explains why strokes are rare in the Arctic regions,
where the intense cold freezes out the water in the
air, or in the desert of Sahara. The laboratory has a
constant, artificial climate. There is just so much
humidity no more, no less. Since the amount of
moisture in the air varies with the heat, the tempera-
ture is maintained at 70 degrees Fahrenheit.
The men in the laboratory deal not only with light-
ning of their own making but with death. Like the
crew of a submarine, they obey a code of instructions,
an engineering ritual. Everywhere are automatic
switches. Unless the collapsible lazy-tongs gateway
that bars the entrance to the laboratory latches and
locks itself, the lightning apparatus cannot be started.
On every hand are similar protective devices.
JOVE'S COMPETITORS 199
An electrician seats himself in a legless chair and
straps himself in. From above, the hook of a travelling
crane descends upon him. He slips it into a steel eye.
In a trice he is lifted to the top of one of the frames,
to make a few connections among the 'clouds'. Then
he is lowered like a barrel of cement, as the crane
travels down the length of its track, and neatly
deposited on the floor just where he started.
The lightning is to flash between two points separ-
ated by about thirty feet in mid-air. A few electricians
on the floor retreat to the walls and the corners far
from the gap.
4 Follow me,' says the engineer in charge.
He leads you up an iron staircase upon a balcony
half-way between floor and ceiling. Orders are
shouted. The lights are dimmed, the better to see
the coming flash. And why not? Is there not always
darkness before a thunderstorm? There is something
ominous in the atmosphere. It is purely psychological
and has nothing in common with the sultry quiet that
precedes the fall of the first few large drops of a real
storm. But there is the same sense of expectancy, the
sense of an impending manifestation.
' It takes half a minute to charge the capacitors,'
says the engineer, aware that you are wondering why
nothing happens in this gloom. The storm is brewing,
it seems, and the process is much like nature's, but
more rapid. ' There will be a warning shout,' you are
told, ' a few seconds before the flash.'
The shout is heard. The moment has come. You
200 SCIENCE TODAY AND .TOMORROW
stare straight ahead and wait you know not quite
for what. Then a blinding flash, a sharp, ear-splitting
report. Darkness again. You are startled awed.
But the flash and the report are over so quickly that
you scarcely know what happened. A terrific stroke
has been delivered near you, and you have been spared
because of the precautions taken in your behalf. There
is a feeling of relief when the flash is over.
Technically untrained visitors expect something like
the crash of real lightning. What they hear is the crack
of a field-piece. There is no thunder only just
enough of an echo in the laboratory to suggest what
happens among the clouds or in a valley when rever-
berations roll and roll. It is the engineer who is really
overwhelmed. He knows that the energy in the flash
is equal to that at the muzzles of six sixteen-inch
naval guns.
Ten million volts go into that mighty efTort. Never
before has man made lightning on such a scale. When
the largest spark passes it can bridge a gap of sixty
feet 65,000,000 horse-power leap through the air for
a millionth of a second or so. Of course there is no
generator on earth that can produce so much energy
for even a minute. We deal here with a piling up of
energy and its dissipation in a moment with an
electrical explosion in effect. The performance is so
dramatically impressive not only because of the mo-
mentary, blinding glare and the gun-like crack, but
because lightning has been reduced to an engineering
basis. The voltage, or pressure, and the amperage, or
JOVE'S COMPETITORS 201
strength, is measured as accurately as ordinary mor-
tals measure the passing of time by the clock.
' There will be another flash/ the engineer warns.
The generator in the background is hard at work
pumping more electrons into the artificial clouds
the capacitors among the insulators on the wooden
frames. Another shout from below. Again a flaming
blade pierces the air, and again the ears are deafened
with the report. So at intervals of a few minutes new
electrical storms are brewed, and new searing flashes
leap the gap in mid-air. And that pungent smell, very
slightly suggestive of freshly sliced onions? Ozone.
Even in the open, where the winds blow, it is notice-
able after lightning has rent the air.
You discover something about your eyes that
puzzles. You think you see the flash long after it
has been extinguished. ' Retinal persistence,' explains
your guide. * It takes time to see anything, even
though the time is but the minute fraction of a second,
and it takes time to wipe out the image formed on
the retina and telegraphed to the brain/ A good deal
of imagination is probably at work when some claim
to see the flash as long as half a minute after it has
come and gone. The truth is that the stroke is seen
after it has disappeared. Light travels about 100 feet
in the tftne that the huge spark passes, and the
distance of the eye from the gap is a little more than
that.
What we have seen thus far may be compared with
flashes that pass from cloud to cloud far above the
202 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
earth. The order is given to prepare for vertical strokes
the kind that splits trees to the roots. Again the
electrician below takes his seat in his legless chair,
and again the crane above drops a hook to lift him
high among the 'clouds'. There he makes a few
adjustments. On the floor below a telegraph-pole is
set up. To guide the lightning to it a metal rod is
placed upon it.
Once more the generator is started. A deafening
crash. A vivid serpent strikes the metal rod on the
telegraph-pole. There is a shower of splinters.
Another flash. More splinters, some of them three
feet long. Bolt after bolt is thus shct through the
wood until the little that remains is as fuzzy as a
brush. It is as if a mighty axe had cleft the wood from
top to bottom. There is no sign of charring. Nor is
there in a tree that has been split by lightning in the
open. For the scientific interest of it, fires are set,
conductors vaporized, explosions produced in water
and oil. About everything is duplicated that nature
does when she hurls a bolt from cloud to earth.
A dozen or more bolts flung at a miniature Empire
State Building proved that the original acts as a per-
fect lightning rod, not only for itself but for all other
buildings within a radius of 2-5 times its height if the
threatening cloud is not too low. Verification has come
over and over again when the building is struck dur-
ing storms without the slightest damage. Those who
sit at their desks in the offices never know that
hundreds of millions of volts are dissipating them-
JOVE'S COMPETITORS 203
selves in the steel frame when the lightning crashes.
Out of such studies came a method of reducing the
hazard of oil-storage tanks. Twenty million dollars'
worth of oil was destroyed by fire in 1926 in Southern
California. Now huge steel towers rise from 75 to
200 feet, each terminating in a piece of iron pipe
tapered to a point. Each tower, like the Empire State
Building, protects an area, and since the areas overlap
there is reason to suppose that the tank district of
Southern California is as safe as it can be made.
The longer the gap to be leaped, the higher must
be the voltage. Luckily for man and his work, most
lightning flashes are between 800 and 1500 feet long
and, still more luckily, most of them pass from cloud
to cloud. We have only to multiply each foot by
100,000 in order to arrive at the probable total voltage
in lightning. Hence even an 8oo-foot flash represents
a pressure of 80,000,000 volts.
Lightning is a pulsating discharge a succession of
strokes each of which lives and dies in a few millionths
of a second. If there were a way of repeating the
strokes over and over again we would have an arc.
There is no way, but the result is no longer lightning.
With the aid of a 2,ooo,ooo-volt alternating current
generator (a machine that produces sixty complete
cycles of oscillations a second in a circuit) a display
is produced that shames the average Fourth of July
celebration. In the darkened laboratory a weird violet
glow appears on the wires. Corona, this is called.
There is a hissing like that of high-pressure steam
204 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
from fine holes a sign that the accumulating voltage
is endeavouring to escape from each rough spot of
metal. The wire points are arranged in the form of
an open triangle, measuring nine and a half feet on
each side. The points become the centre of the tri-
angle, no longer violet now but brilliantly white.
Louder and louder become the hissing and the snap-
ping until at last the tongues meet in a flaming arc
which rises in a mighty turmoil of electric flame
twenty feet high. What was mere hissing becomes
a roar as the arc strikes and restrikes across the empty
space within the triangle. In a photograph the arc
looks like a delicate web of minute threads of elec-
tricity.
Coronas are beautiful but useless. They represent
leaks and constitute visual evidence that billions and
billions of electrons are streaming out of conductors
every second. The laws of corona discharge are now
so well known that they are applied in preventing
losses on high-voltage transmission lines. If engineers
ever succeed in sending electricity at 1,000,000 volts,
the wires will have to be very smooth and six inches
in diameter. Corona studies have their bearing on the
problem of lighting; for coronas, at least in the
laboratory, are a form of tamed lightning.
What is the result of all this study in the laboratory
and in the open? What measures are adopted to pro-
tect central stations? Billions of horse-power that flash
through the air in a few millionths of a second cannot
be tamed. They must be given a chance to wear them-
JOVE'S COMPETITORS 205
selves out, or they must be sidetracked. By means of
automatic oil-circuit breakers and complicated insula-
tors so much has been done to protect lines that inter-
ruptions of service are rare. But out of research has
come a much more effective method the sidetrack-
ing method. Extra 'shield' wires are strung from one
transmission tower to another, just above the conduc-
tors, and then a connection is made with the earth.
Hence the term 'ground wires'. Still other ground
wires run from the steel legs of the towers to terminals
sunk in the earth many feet away. A ioo,ooo,ooo-volt
lightning-bolt refers these ground wires to the trans-
mission line, and by them it is diverted into the
ground, where it spreads out harmlessly. A 66,000-
volt line in Pennsylvania has been thus safeguarded
for twenty-one years.
But is not this a modification of Ben Franklin's
familiar lightning-rod? It is. And we have made no
progress since 1752 ? We have. Great progress, in fact.
Franklin's principle, the result of correct reasoning
rather than of any experiment he may have made with
kites in a thunderstorm, is the only one that can be
applied. But protecting a line hanging from the insu-
lated cross-arms of steel towers and extending in some
cases 250 miles across open country is a very different
matter from protecting a house or a barn with a
properly grounded rod or two. Only after painstaking
measurements of real lightning, only after experi-
menting with artificial lightning on models and on
full-sized transmission systems, could the forces that
206 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
had to be sidetracked be gauged. Engineering ade-
quacy was essential, and that could be assured only
by research. Modern lightning protection for central
stations is measured protection.
XV. Speed
THE WHOLE HISTORY OF SPEED IS A HISTORY OF RIDING.
A horse is a living engine. An automobile is a mecha-
nical eagle. Men ride both. Is it strange that the first
efforts to create artificial animals should have been
rather crude imitations of nature?
A bird flaps its wings. Hence centuries were wasted
in the attempt to make a mechanical bird with wings
that a man might move with levers. Wings were
strapped to arms and inventive fanatics even leaped
from clifls in fatal attempts to flap through space. A
technique of invention had to be evolved before
mechanical creatures could be devised which would
whisk a man through the air as if on a magic carpet.
Even invention was not enough. Science had to study
what Solomon called 'the way of an eagle in the air'
and the invisible swirls, cascades, and billows in the
air itself before the airplane could be invented. Who
was the primitive savage, conscious of his own limita-
tions, who first dared to ride a wild horse and thus
increase his own speed? How did he learn to tame
horses? Whoever he may have been, he was a
modernist in his thirst for speed, a scientist in his long-
ing to use his brain and let another organism work
for him, the precursor of engineers who now design
airplanes that cleave the air at 400 miles an hour, the
ancestor of unborn technicians who will ride not
mechanical wings but rockets to the moon.
Is there any limit to speed? In the dense lower atmo-
sphere there is. Tests were made in the huge wind-
tunnel of Langley Field, Virginia a structure in
207
208 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
which a storm can be created that dwarfs anything
experienced on earth. An airplane was suspended
within the tunnel while a gale rushed from one end to
the other at 800 miles an hour. The forces to which
the machine was subjected were measured. In other
words, the process was the reverse of flying. It was
found that at about 600 miles an hour the resistance in
actual flight would be such that engines could not
make much headway against it. The plane pushes a
mass of air instead of parting it smoothly, just as a sled
pushes snow. For practical aviation 600 miles an hour
is the limit that laboratory science places on speed in
the lower air.
Much is also made of the fact that the human
organism has adapted itself to the earth a planet of
definite mass that pulls everything to it with a definite
force. At rest, we are all subject to what the physicists
call an 'acceleration of g', the 'g' being gravity. There
is some reason to believe that for about two seconds
8g can be endured, but that log may result in injury
if not death. But the evidence on which these deduc-
tions are based is none too good. Men have fallen from
high bridges into rivers at more than 8g and have been
none the worse for their experience.
At the beginning of the century there were scientists
enough to predict that the human body could never
withstand more than 100 miles an hour. Before the
war the limit was raised to 200. Biological processes
are certainly aflected with an abnormal increase in
speed.
SPEED 2O9
On a straight course the hazards are not great. But
the turns! If they are sharp the heart beats faster and
often the blood rushes to the nose. And then the
'blackout' the removal of blood from the eye by
centrifugal force. Yet consciousness and control of
the muscles are retained. Experts hesitate to predict
what would happen on a turn made at 300 miles an
hour. Yet R. L. Archerly of the Royal Air Force once
looped the loop at that speed and topped off the per-
formance with a perfect barrel roll. It is quite possible
that racing pilots sometimes make turns at speeds so
high that the centrifugal force presses the brain stem
almost to the point of death.
But these are exceptional circumstances. The atmo-
sphere is vast. There is no reason why the pilot of
a commercial airplane should subject himself and his
passengers to the agonies of sharp turns at high speed.
Nor is there any physiological reason to fear straight-
away travel at 600 miles in the lower atmosphere
the troposphere in which we live or a possible 1000
miles an hour or more in the stratosphere at levels
where air resistance is but a fraction of that known to
us.
Always it has been energy that made speed possible.
A running man, a galloping horse expends energy in
travelling fast, and the higher the speed the greater the
expenditure of energy. So it was natural that the first
mechanical vehicles should have been designed with
no other thought than that of carrying engines with-
out shaking themselves to pieces. And the vehicles
210 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
themselves were adaptations of natural or traditional
forms. The locomotive is still called the 'iron horse',
not without reason. Such is the weight of tradition
that railway passenger-cars are still reminiscent of the
stage coaches from which they sprang. Automobiles
do not wholly conceal their horse-carriage ancestry
even in these days of rounded forms.
As we look back now at the evolution of our fast
vehicles it seems strange that in copying nature we
overlooked one essential of speed. The /ounded breast
of the vulture and albatross and stormy petrel, the
rounded nose and tapering body of a pike hunters
and fishermen learned nothing from them for cen-
turies. So we see the inventors and engineers, when at
last they had unlimited power at their disposal, rely-
ing at first wholly on energy to attain speed. Bigger
and bigger grew the engines, but the speed did not
increase proportionately. Weight was saved, where
possible. That helped, because it obviously takes more
energy to haul a heavy weight than a light one. Ships
were made slim of waist and sharp of prow on the
principle that a knife cuts better if its edge is keen.
Yet a few physicists, all this time, were measuring
energies and speeds trying to find out why it was
that it took so much energy to increase speed by only
a little. There was William Froude, for example,
brother of the famous historian James Anthony. That
painstaking scientist had H.M.S. Greyhound towed
by H.M.S. Active while he made exact measurements.
He built a towing-tank and made more measurements
SPEED 211
with models of ships. It might be supposed that as
the speed is doubled the resistance is also doubled.
Actually it is quadrupled. It goes up as the square of
the speed. Worse still, the power increases as the cube,
so that if it takes 2000 horsepower to make 10 knots it
takes 8000 to make 20.
All this applies to railway trains as well as to ships.
The physicists were exclaiming : ' Cut down resist-
ance. BlufT fronts and sharp prows are equally wrong.
Get rid of all projections.' No one paid any attention.
Funnels that belched black smoke, waves that curled
up under bows, foaming wakes these were the
evidences of speed. They were also evidences of blind
inefficiency.
It was the aeronautic engineers who made the word
'streamlining' part of the everyday vocabulary. They
were less hampered by tradition than the builders of
locomotives and ships. From the very first, men like
Lilienthal in Germany, Maxim in England, Langley
and the Wrights in America, had measured resistance.
They knew what it meant in energy wasted to rake
the air with a hundred wires and stays. Eiffel and
Prandtl experimented with wind-tunnels. Forms by
the hundred were studied to discover which one could
be pushed along with the least disturbance to the air.
Everything was tested wings, propeller-blades,
struts. It was better, they found, to drive a correctly
designed bulk through the air than to rake it with
excrescences.
Out of these researches came a hull, rounded like
212 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
an egg in front, tapering off in the rear. Wings, too,
were bluntly curved in front and tapering. Even struts
were given the new shape.
It was incredible how speed records in the air were
broken when these principles were at last adopted. In
1913, fifty miles an hour was about all that could be
expected of an ordinary plane. In 1931 Stainforth of
the Royal Air Force won the Schneider Trophy by
attaining a speed of 407-5 miles an hour since beaten
by more than thirty-four miles an hour.
Had any of the recent record-breakers been exposed
to the air, his frontal area of some four square feet,
seated, would have encountered a resistance of about
2000 pounds. And had he put out his hand, his wrist
would probably have been broken. At the terrific speed
of more than 440 miles an hour the air-pressure upon
it would have amounted to about ninety pounds to the
square inch. As it is, the pilot slips through the air
with no sense of the pressure upon his machine. He is
merely the brain of a mighty mechanical sea-bird.
Streamlining alone does not explain the new
speeds. It can do no more than to reduce resistance
and make better use of the energy available. Engines,
powerful engines, will always be necessary.
The more perfect the vehicle, the more perfect must
be the surface. Ordinarily we give little thought to the
railway track and the concrete highway and the part
that they play in high-speed travel, yet without them
our locomotives and our record-breaking automobiles
would be useless.
SPEED 213
Why do the automobile record-breakers journey all
the way to Florida or Utah to test their cars ? Because
there they find the only stretches long enough and
smooth enough in a civilized country. The ideal track
for breaking the mile record would be fifteen miles
long, level as a billiard-table, and straight.
What appears to be a fine smooth beach at seventy
or eighty miles an hour becomes rougher than a
corduroy road at 200 and therefore dangerous. The
high-speed machines seem to flutter over the beach
because of the wind ripples on the sands. The slight-
est unevenness causes wheel-spin and a drop in
speed. A bump two or three inches high makes the
car leap twenty or thirty feet forward clear of the
ground.
Let the optimist who believes that if a record-breaker
can make nearly five miles a minute a stock car of the
future can do likewise on the open road, consider what
must be faced. A record-breaker is built to race for just
a minute and a half. It carries about 30 gallons of
water and 28 of fuel only enough for ten miles or
two runs in opposite directions over the course, in-
cluding the stretches required for acquiring speed and
slowing down. It cannot possibly run fifteen consecu-
tive minutes at 250 miles an hour without breaking
down. Nothing about it is normal. Brakes have to be
applied by a motor because muscles cannot perform
the task evenly enough. A little hole is bored in the
windshield to let in air. Otherwise goggles would be
sucked off the forehead and perhaps the driver himself
214 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
out of his seat. At 245 miles an hour the wheels make
about 2300 revolutions a minute. Even the tyres,
specially made to withstand a run of 350 miles an hour,
are good for no more than four minutes. The treads
are only one thirty-second of an inch thick. If they
were heavier they would be flung off by centrifugal
force like mud.
The marking flags are usually set 100 yards apart.
As the car races faster and faster against time they
draw together. At 200 miles they are like the pickets
in a fence. Only twelve seconds elapse before the run
is over.
A tail has to keep the machine on its course. If the
car slews around only slightly at full speed the tremen-
dous pressure of the wind straightens out the fin
again. A side wind tends to deflect the car from its
course. Hence the watchful eye kept on the wind and
the wind-gauges. Lead is used to weigh the car down
and enable it to grip the sand.
We see, then, what 250 miles an hour or more on
the open road means. Highways perhaps 500 feet wide
and as straight as surveyors can make them for
stretches of 100 miles or more; cars provided with
stabilization fins and devices to prevent them from
becoming airplanes; tyres of sturdier construction than
those made for racing, since they must run for hours
and not for minutes; and engines of a power un-
dreamed of for cars produced in the quantities to
which we are now accustomed pile up the condi-
tions, and the prospects become mere and more
SPEED 215
dubious of speeding at more than 100 miles an hour
on the open road.
Automobiles being limited by rather narrow curv-
ing highways at present to an average of less than 100
miles an hour, it is to steel rails that we must look for
greater speeds on land. Driven by the competition of
the gasolene engine and the concrete road to recapture
their lost passengers, the railways have at last listened
to the physicist.
Articulated trains, driven by oil-electric motors over
straight stretches at no miles an hour, usher in the
new streamlined era. Not even a whistle protrudes
from one of these metal serpents. Everything is tucked
away in neat recesses.
But is this the end ? Long before streamlining had
been applied to airplanes, engineers and inventors had
developed on paper ingenious monorail ways on which
average speeds of 150 miles an hour and maximum
speeds of 200 and more were possible. Trains which
could run on single wheels in tandem and cross an
abyss on a steel cable and which were held up by gyro-
stats when they came to a stop one sighs to think
they never had a chance because of the heavy invest-
ment in a system that is but the offspring of wooden
stringers laid in the mud of a mine and over which
horse-drawn coal-skips could crawl without sinking to
the hub.
We have now reviewed what has been accomplished
in attaining high speed with the aid of mechanical
energy and correct modelling to reduce resistance.
2l6 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
We have seen that only a racing car can exceed 300
miles an hour and that stock automobiles are not likely
to exceed 100 miles an hour, because there are not
enough long, straight stretches and because an entirely
new and much too expensive type of vehicle would
have to be designed for anything approaching 200
miles an hour.
So it is up into the stratosphere that we must climb
if we are ever to attain commercial speeds of 600 miles
and more. For in the blue there are no narrow con-
crete roads to consider, no tracks with sharp curves. In
that uncanny layer there are no clouds, no storms,
nothing that we designate by the word 'weather'.
More important to the aerial navigator is the almost
total absence of wind. With the air only one-ninth
as dense at 50,000 feet as at sea-level an airplane can
travel faster than sound.
There can be no doubt that the stratosphere will at
last be conquered. But an airplane must be evolved
which differs as radically from that in which we soar
from New York to Chicago in five hours as the
streamlined train of today from the steam train with
its lumbering coaches.
Climbing to 50,000 feet that is in itself a formid-
able technical difficulty. In the stratosphere it is harder
for blades to bite the medium, harder for the propeller
to screw itself forward. But the first successful vari-
able-pitch propellers have already been made.
Then there is the matter of the engines. They
breathe air just as a human being does The altitude
SPEED 217
of somewhat more than seven miles possible with
special airplanes of today can be attained only with
superchargers devices that pump air to the gasping
engine. Something better is needed for stratosphere
flying. Possibly oxygen.
If engines gasp, what of crew and passengers? They
must take their places in a hermetically sealed
fuselage, properly warmed. An artificial atmosphere
must be created with the aid of liquid oxygen slowly
released from steel bottles or of superchargers. The
vitiated air must be cleansed with chemicals or
expelled. Moreover, the artificial atmosphere will have
a pressure higher than that of the surrounding strato-
sphere, which means a stout construction to prevent
the fuselage from blowing apart.
Remembering that in an airplane ounces must be
saved, problems are presented by these and other con-
siderations that have thus far proved too much for the
best aeronautic engineers of our time. Yet who can
doubt that the stratosphere airplane is the next step
in the attainment of speed? Breakfast in New York,
luncheon in London the feat will be a commonplace
fifty years hence.
XVI. A Liner Leaves Port
THERE IS NOT MUCH DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE POWER-
plant of a great liner such as the Queen Mary or the
Queen Elizabeth and the central station that supplies
a city such as Boston or Detroit with electricity, except
that the liner not only generates energy but applies it
to drive propellers, light lamps, cook food, run lifts,
make electric horses in the gymnasium jounce up and
down. It is the compactness of these hundreds of
pumps, motors, switchboards, these miles of asbestos-
clad pipes that impresses. A watch is no more tightly
packed with mechanism than is the hold with
machines of a hundred different kinds.
The boilers are strung along the bottom in com-
partments, each as large as a ballroom. It is about as
hard to enter one of these rooms as it is a bank vault.
You pass through an airlock a space between two
hermetically sealed doors. Open the outer door and
step into the space. At once the inner door is locked.
It cannot be opened until the outer door clangs
behind you. If for some good reason the inner door
is open an officer coming out of a boiler-room, per-
haps the outer door is locked. Signal-lights visible
through windows tell whether the way is clear or not.
Why all this mystery and ceremony? The ship
has what is technically called the 'closed stokehold
system'. In plain English this means that the fans by
which the oil fires are kept at white heat blow not
directly into the furnaces but into the boiler-rooms.
So the air in the boiler-room is above atmospheric
pressure not much, but enough to set up a rush
219
220 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
through the fireboxes and funnels.
Forced draught depends on superatmospheric pres-
sure in every one of the boiler-rooms. If there were
no airlocks, if a boiler-room were to be entered or left
with no precaution, the engineer in charge would
know it quickly enough. A twitching indicator would
show that the pressure was jumping up and down.
The boilers are more sensitive to 'feed water' than
the human stomach. There are objectionable mineral
salts held in solution. Sooner or later they would
crystallize inside the boiler-tubes through which the
water courses. And sooner or later nearly 150,000
tubes would be clogged. Every day 300 tons of fresh
water are sucked out of the double bottom by centri-
fugal pumps, filtered, stirred up with a creamy
solution of lime and soda, agitated by blasts of air,
precipitated and otherwise reduced to a proper state
of chemical impotency. To keep the water pure in an
engineering sense, tell-tale instruments are periodi-
cally read. They indicate the chlorine and alkaline
content.
If by any chance you could introduce a pinch or
two of salt into a feed-line, gongs would go off, lights
would flare up ominously, fingers on indicators would
point accusingly to danger-marks, and an engineer
would at once make an investigation. In fact, one way
of testing the instruments is to pour a glass of first-
class table water into the feed-water line. If the result
is the expected instrumental anguish, all is well with
the alarm system. There is also a little chemical
A LINER LEAVES PORT 221
laboratory where one of the engineers makes a few
simple tests every day just to be sure that the water
gulped into the boilers is of the required softness.
What goes into the boilers is no more important
than what comes out of the funnels. Hence the flue-
gas indicators. If there is too little carbon dioxide
(which does not burn at all) and too much carbon
monoxide (which does burn), the fires are not what
they should be.
Thick masses of smoke curling out of funnels are
not an engineer's conception of perfect combustion.
The less smoke the better. Automatically every
engineer on the ship glances up at a mirror when he
passes certain places. It reflects down into the stoke-
hold the beam from an electric lamp. The beam has
to travel across the funnel. If there is no reflection
there is too much smoke.
Nowadays large passenger liners are fired by oil.
Gone are half-naked coal-passers and stokers, gone
the scraping and clanging of shovels, gone all the
grime and much of the sweat. How much oil a
record-breaking liner burns in a day is a dark secret.
But since there are fast steamers that burn no more
than six-tenths of a pound of oil for each horse-power
in an hour it is a fair guess that noo tons of fuel oil
a day will suffice when the Queen Mary or the Queen
Elizabeth is doing her best.
Boiler and engine efficiencies have improved in the
last twenty years. There is more superheating of steam
than there used to be. Steam-pressures are higher.
222 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
Heat is saved as if it were tangible money. Before
gases stream out of the funnels they preheat the air
and the oil that reach the burners.
With dazzling flames roaring from 168 burners it
might be supposed that the boiler-rooms would be
barely tolerable. It is just warm summer weather in
the stokehold year in and year out. You can rest your
hand on a boiler, so effectively does its overcoat of
thick asbestos keep in the heat.
When the order comes down from the bridge for a
burst of speed or the engineer in charge of the boilers
sees that more steam will be needed, there is no excite-
ment. He simply turns on more oil turns it on
himself or tells some junior officer to do it. There-
upon, nozzles out of which filtered oil sprays in fine
jets burn with a little more intensity. But when the
ship is to be driven hard he may order burner-tubes
removed and others of larger size substituted. It takes
only a few minutes. Changing tyres on an automobile
is harder, more time-consuming. There is none of the
fussing, none of the swearing, none of the fuming
that we associate with Mississippi steamboat races of
Mark Twain's time.
Aft of the aftermost boilers are the spacious engine-
rooms two of them, spotlessly clean, separated by
a bulkhead. Disappointment awaits you if you are
thinking in motion-picture terms of .a-fashioned
engines. Here is a ship that has mad' over thirty-two
knots that may be actually ma 1 *ng thirty as you
stand amid her propelling machinery. And yet noth-
A LINER LEAVES PORT 223
ing apparently moves. The engine-room of a ferry-
boat is far more active. There are no rods flashing
in and out of tall cylinders, no thumping pistons.
This little world is turbine-driven, and a turbine is
simply a huge, horizontal, unromantic, drumlike box
of steel in which turns a spindle carrying thousands
of vanes. Shoot steam against the vanes just as wind
is blown against a windmill and the spindle rotates.
All that you see is the outer casing and that tells you
no more of the whirling within than an unlabelled
tin tells that it contains tomatoes.
Not until you reach the after end of the last turbine
do you see anything that turns. There your eye falls
on one of the four propeller-shafts. They are hollow
and as big as many city water-mains. Watch them
closely; their glint tells you that they are whirling.
Far at the outer ends furious 35-ton four-bladed
bronze propellers thrash the sea into a frothy wake.
Steam flashes through a turbine with the speed of
a rifle-bullet. After it has pushed and kicked the vanes
of the high-pressure turbine around there is still so
much energy in it that it can drive a first intermediate-
pressure turbine, then a second intermediate and a
low-pressure turbine. Finally it goes into a condenser
a gigantic box filled with thousands of tubes
through which cold sea water constantly flows. By
that time it is weary and tepid. What little life is still
left in the form of heat the condenser absorbs. Chilled
by the cold tubes, it falls in a rain. There is virtually
no air in the vacuous condenser nothing but the
224 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
rain, which goes back again into the boiler feed-line.
Fresh water is too precious to waste.
Turbines are high-speed machines. The Queen
Mary's or the Queen Elizabeth's sixteen (four to a
shaft) spin at 3600 revolutions a minute. On the other
hand, a propeller does its best work at 240. When
turbines were the newest mechanical marvels, back
in the nineties, their spindles were extended astern to
become propeller-shafts. With this arrangement the
screws did not grip well. The watei had no time
to flow in. What the engineers called 'cavitation'
occurred. Hence the modern practice of driving pro-
peller-shafts through gearing.
The four sets of turbines have at the end of their
common spindles helical pinions. The pinions mesh
with gear-wheels fourteen times as big. The big gears,
of course, are on the inner ends of the propeller-shafts.
So by these meshing pinions and gears, housed in
boxes, the 3600 revolutions of the turbines become 240
at the propellers.
The engine-rooms are not silent. Fast machines
hum. Gears drone. Yet because of the steadiness and
the insistence you are scarcely aware of the assault on
the ears. The engine-room is tensely vibrant. Try to
talk. The voice must be pushed out of the throat
against the tension.
The liner draws on her maximum horse-power of
200,000 only when she is driving at well over thirty
knots. When she picks her way through the crowded
shipping of New York Harbour and the Hudson
A LINER LEAVES PORT 225
River, and manoeuvres in and out of her berth, she
needs only a fraction of all that power. Her turbines
are therefore divided into two propulsion-plants. Cut
out either one and she becomes a twin-screw ship for
the time being.
But this means in turn two engine-room staffs
directed from the bridge. It also means two control-
platforms, which are of cerebral importance and
which run right athwart the ship. They are like high
bridges that overlook the entire engine-room. Lean
over the slightly oily steel railing and you see below
the non-committal turbines and a score of auxiliary
machines, pumps, electric motors, and huge steam-
pipes lapped in asbestos.
The engineers on the platform glance occasionally
at about a hundred instruments arranged on what is
called the 'dashboard'. Gauges indicate the pressure
of the steam that flings itself at the vanes in a turbine,
tachometers count the revolutions made by the tur-
bines and the propeller-shafts, inclinometers show the
tilt of the ship. Then there are oil-pressure measurers,
vacuum-gauges, voltmeters, ammeters, and thermo-
meters to tell how hot the steam is.
All these instruments are in effect mechanical senses
through which the ship's many machines communi-
cate with the engineers on the two platforms. ' Feel-
ing fine, making 3200 revolutions a minute,' reports
a turbine spindle through a tachometer. ' Oil-pressure
beginning to fall,' warns another. ' Vacuum's not
high enough,' says a third. The instruments are fairly
p
226 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
steady, once the ship is under way. Some indicators
hardly move for hours.
Because there are limits to what the human brain
can grasp, the engineers do not rely entirely on the
instruments. Long before danger-points are reached in
any important part of the propelling machinery, red
lights flare up, gongs ring, whistles blow, klaxons
scream. In addition there are many devices that
prevent the making of a false move in turning a valve
or throwing a lever precautions that again take the
form of suddenly glowing lights or clamouring gongs.
The bridge and the platforms can talk to each other
through telephones as well as to other parts of the
ship. But most of the communication takes place
through engine-telegraphs. The bridge has one set,
each platform another duplicates. For each of the
four sets of turbines that drives a propeller there is a
telegraph.
In the middle of a telegraph-dial is a peremptory
'Stop', and on either side of that are orders reading
'Full', 'Half, 'Slow', 'Dead Slow', and 'Stand by'.
When the bridge signals 'Slow', gongs ring and the
indicator on the corresponding telegraph on the plat-
form obediently moves to 'Slow' on the left or
'Ahead' side. The proper engineer on the platform
moves a lever to 'Slow', and an answering signal in
bells signifies to the bridge that the order has been
received. Manoeuvring is so completely in the hands
of the executive officer on the bridge that he tele-
graphs what particular sets of turbine* are to do.
A LINER LEAVES PORT
227
Starting the machinery is easy enough. It is done
by means of horizontal wheels about three feet in
diameter. The long spindles of the wheels extend to
the steam valves. A turn of a wheel and steam shoots
from a high-pressure nozzle into the high-pressure
turbines.
Every minute of engine-room time is accounted for
in a record kept by one of the engineers on the plat-
form. When, for example, the Queen Mary leaves
New York on a weekday morning, the movement log
may look like this :
Starboard
Astern slow 11-01
Astern full 11-12
Stop
Astern half
Astern full
Stop
Ahead slow
11-21
11-24^
1 1 -26
Port
Astern half 11-01
Astern full ii-i2 I / t
Stop 11-15
Ahead half 11-16
Ahead full 11-18
Ahead slow 1 1
All this means that the liner with the assistance of
busy tugs is backing out into the Hudson, that pro-
pellers are now churning ahead and now astern to
head her downstream, that at last she is steaming
slowly down the river into the bay. An hour and a
half later the pilot shakes hands with the executive
228 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
officer on the bridge, scuttles down several decks,
clambers down a ladder over the side into a bobbing
rowboat which takes him to the pilot boat. Then the
engine telegraphs of both platforms ring 'Stand by'.
A minute later comes the signal 'Half and then
'Full*.
The ship is on her way.
XVII. Electric Immortality
ALL ABOUT US ARE GHOSTS. THEY SLIP INVISIBLY THROUGH
the ether with the speed of light. They glide over
wires in less than a second from New York to San
Francisco. They come and go on television screens.
Not ghosts of the dead are they but of countless living
men and women who sit in their homes and their
offices and send their discarnate personalities to the
uttermost parts of the earth and charge them to
deliver messages of love and hate, joy and sorrow, to
gather news of life and death, success and failure, and
bring it back in the twinkling of an eye. Nothing in
the dubious annals of spiritualism even remotely
approaches the miracle that science performs in dis-
embodying the living.
I pick up the telephone and ask for a connection
with Clarence Brayton, 23 Stockton Street, London.
Fifteen minutes later my bell rings and the operator
informs me that London is ready. Brayton and I talk.
So far as the conversation goes we are sightless, even
bodiless. The engineers have reduced us to two voices
and two pairs of ears, and sent their electrical equiva-
lents shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic.
'Stripped of flesh' is the Oxford Dictionary's defini-
tion of 'discarnate'. If ever living man is stripped of
flesh yet permitted to communicate, it is when he
telephones. A sense is given the power of leaving the
body and travelling through space; yet the body,
unaware of the process, is left intact.
With radio broadcasting the discarnation assumes
an even more bewildering aspect. The President sits
22Q
230 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
in the White House, half a dozen microphones on his
desk, and speaks of the state of the nation. Through
mountains and walls his electric ghost passes, as light
through glass. He ripples through space and enters
millions of homes. Half the planet hears. The trans-
mitting apparatus by which he is disembodied is a
small dark sun that radiates him invisibly. And the
receiving sets in our homes are merely electrical and
mechanical eyes that see him and translate him to us
in terms of the spoken word. We create an electrical
organism to perceive an aspect of him to which our
physical eyes arc blind. He is all voice to us; we are
all ears to him.
Now that we have television we carry the process
still farther. Quite painlessly a face is minced into
250,000 bits of light and shade every second. * Take
this bit of left eye and put it exactly where it belongs
on the screen,' orders the transmitter. And the receiver
obediently puts the bit of left eye where it belongs in
Chicago, St. Louis, in scores of places at once. So with
every part of the face. It is a mosaic that television
image on the receiving-screen. But a mosaic which is
pulled apart and pieced together so rapidly over and
over again that the eye cannot follow the process and
accepts the vision as a whole, just as it accepts as a
whole a man crossing the street.
Some day we shall have stereoscopic television
images in full colour with an apparent third dimen-
sion. Though we may be enthralled by a drama on a
motion-picture screen, we know that the photographic
ELECTRIC IMMORTALITY 23!
players are only flat recognizable masses of light and
shade. With television of the future it will be differ-
ent. Figures and faces will appear life-sized; they will
have solidity. In fact they will seem as real as if they
were actually in the room. But walk up to them
and feel them. Try to take from a spectral hand the
flower that it offers. Only the surface of the screen
will meet the touch to prove that these men and
women who smile and gesture are but ghosts after
all.
There are tales enough of clairvoyance of persons
who have seen, darkly as in a glass, events that are
happening in the uttermost parts of the earth. But in
television we have the clairvoyance of science, the
kind that can be controlled with electrical circuits and
switches. Crystal-gazing assumes a new dignity when
the glass is a television-screen.
Think now of the social consequences a generation
or so hence. The world is struggling in the throes of
war. Desperately the Prime Ministers of the European
countries involved, the President of the United States,
and the heads of the principal members of the British
Commonwealth of nations (once colonies) are trying
to find the way that leads to peace. They do not
journey physically hundreds of miles to one spot as
Chamberlain, Hitler, Daladier and Mussolini did in
1938. They meet electrically. A convention of spectres
settles the fate of civilization.
The President of the United States sits in a tele-
vision-room next to his office. Around him are a dozen
232 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
screens as large as those in motion-picture theatres
of our own day. He is in the dark, yet in a blaze of
invisible infra-red rays. A camera points at him inces-
santly. Pitilessly it catches every passing frown, every
hopeful glint of his eye. And so with his communi-
cants in distant cities. He sees their electrical ghosts
on the screens around him; he hears their discarnate
voices.
' I deny categorically that paragraph forty-five,
section two, of the Treaty of Madrid either says or
implies that we are not to use atomic energy for the
production of synthetic gold,' says the Japanese Prime
Minister too vehemently. * I hold up the document
and I point to the paragraph and section in question.
Read for yourselves.' He shakes his free, clenched fist
at the phantoms around him. On twelve screens in
twelve widely separated capitals the Japanese glares
indignantly through his horn-rimmed spectacles, and
a close-up of the treaty appears, so that all may read.
His clenched fist has been transported with the
document.
' It is true that the section says nothing about syn-
thetic gold specifically,' observes the ghost of the
British Prime Minister as it appears simultaneously in
the twelve rooms. ' But I submit that the sentence,
" Atomic energy shall not be used to undermine the
economic, financial, and monetary structure of any
signatory nation," has but one meaning.' There are
times when the twelve ghosts arc all talking and
gesticulating at once, so that the President of the
ELECTRIC IMMORTALITY 233
United States, the chairman, has to rap for order and
beg them to restrain themselves and permit him to
conduct the conference in a seemly fashion.
A sceptic will object that international conferences
at which the fate of the world is settled are usually
secret and that radio in any form is as public as the
blue sky. The engineer replies that long before 1929
transatlantic conversations were scrambled in trans-
mission and unscrambled at the receiving end by
special mechanism, so that even if, by some miracle of
good luck, an eavesdropper in space stumbled upon
the wave-length on which they were conducted, he
heard only gibberish. So with these conferences of
important phantoms in the future. Suppose they were
plucked out of the ether. On the screen only a shape-
less, chaotic, ever-changing smear of light and shade
would appear; from the loud-speaker only unintellig-
ible hisses and gutturals would well.
But the real point of this controlled electric clair-
voyance, this meeting of images, minds, and voices at
selected points on earth, is the separation of sight from
the human body. Even in our backward technical day
two senses, sight and hearing, are stripped of flesh.
Is this the end ?
Before modern inventors entered upon the scene
only poets, Hindu mystics, and spinners of fairy-tales
dared to dream of personalities that left bodies and
transported themselves all over the world. It seemed
wildly improbable so late as 1870 that one man could
ever talk to another over a distance greater than a
234 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
human shout could bridge. And even after the tele-
phone was introduced and the way for seeming elec-
trical miracles prepared, it was incredible that the
image of a face would be dismembered and pieced
together again thousands of miles away. The romances
of yesterday are the realities of today. So, just because
my great-grandfather and yours, if they had read about
their speculative possibility, would have regarded the
telephone and television as poetic moonshine, I believe
in teletaction electrical feeling at a distance as a
reality of the future.
How it will be possible for me to shake hands elec-
trically with a friend in San Francisco or Paris, or how
I shall pass a remote electrical hand over my beloved's
hair while she is in the middle of the Indian Ocean
and I am in New York, I do not know. If I am hard
put to it I can imagine myself thrusting my hand into
a box, with little metal feelers almost caressing it as
the skin's electrical halo is explored. I can imagine
corresponding electrical impulses travelling out into
space, just as impulses now travel out when I talk into
a radio microphone. And I can imagine these impulses
from my warm, slightly moist skin reaching an
apparatus in which there is an appliance that serves to
create an electric field or halo exactly like that at the
sending end. My friend at the receiver brings his hand
very near that appliance but does not actually touch it.
Little electric waves run from it. A halo is produced
the counterfeit of my hand's. Just as a diaphragm
in a telephone-receiver duplicates the sound of my
ELECTRIC IMMORTALITY 235
voice, so these waves will cause a response that he will
accept as the touch of a real hand. The effect of little
wrinkles, the warmth, the slight moisture every-
thing will be felt.
The transmission of smell and taste, though just as
fantastic now, may be even easier than teletaction.
The two are intimately related, which makes me think
that the electric palate will have to be combined with
an electrical nose if I am to taste and sniff in New
York a dinner served in New Orleans. There will be
no nourishment in these Barmecidal electrical feasts.
I might starve to death as I smelled and tasted the
creations of a remote Esco frier; but I could indulge in
the most extravagant gluttony without ruining my
digestion or experiencing the slightest discomfort.
And the wines of notable vintage that I could guzzle
by the gallon without slipping under the table in a
sodden stupor!
When we now watch a film drama unfold on the
screen we obligingly attribute the voices to the photo-
graphic players, forgetting for the moment that pic-
tures cannot speak. Are our imaginations so powerful
that they will similarly combine five different sense-
impressions at once and create an overpowering
illusion of reality ? Perhaps. Before the talking motion-
picture was introduced, sceptics doubted the possibility
of fooling eyes and ears simultaneously. The necessity
of instandy accepting five separately received sense-
impressions makes me think that we shall not have
time enough to be analytical. Besides, we shall be in
236 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
the gullible frame of mind that now makes us forget
that actors on the motion-picture screen are not living
human beings.
How evanescent are these electrical extensions of
the senses ! When I hang up the telephone-receiver the
world returns to what it was. A snap of a switch to
break a circuit and the radio ghost is laid, whether he
enters the room by way of loud-speaker or television-
screen. Yet it need not be so. These ghosts can be way-
laid, trapped, and brought out to strut, play, sing
again. For every vibration can be recorded and repro-
duced.
It is a common practice nowadays to transcribe radio
addresses. The moving valedictory of former King
Edward when he announced his abdication was sold
on disks in New York twenty-four hours after it was
delivered. So with television. The shifting image can
be recorded as a sound-track on a phonograph, for the
electric waves that carry the bits of image can be made
to vibrate a recording needle. Images are now trans-
lated into grunts, squeals, gasps. To the untutored ear
they are meaningless these queer noises. But the
practised television engineer can say : ' Sounds like
Bergner's face. And that second record, I'm almost
sure, was a park or meadow. Green grass buzzes like
that.'
You do not have to listen to sound records for
months, like such an engineer, before you learn to dis-
tinguish one face from another by ear. The noises can
be changed back into electric waves and the electric
ELECTRIC IMMORTALITY 237
waves again into visions that make sense. And so will
it be with teletaction, telegustation, teleolfaction, if
we must coin words to correspond with 'telephone'.
Whatever the sense-impression may be, it can be
recorded as sound. And the sound can be produced,
converted into waves that will slip through the ether
or over a wire, and the waves translated at their
destination into things that we readily mistake for the
originals that were felt, tasted, or smelled.
With five sense-impressions to be recorded and
reproduced at will, that dinner which I relished so
much with Rosalie, back in 1982, at the Villa Farnese
is not wholly of historic interest. I can enjoy it again
and yet again. Our flirtatious quips, her derisive
laughter, the music of the little orchestra bursting in,
the vision of us, as we sat in the open under the trees,
everything will be preserved for my ageing enjoyment.
Even the dark suggestion of Lake Como in the
distance and the occasional dropping of a leaf upon
the table.
You see now what I am driving at. Immortality!
Electric immortality ! Those old tales of the dead that
come to life again in the graveyard for a few brief
hours, they seem more credible now. For all the elec-
trical ghosts of the dead past can be called out of their
sound-track tombs not by mumbling cryptic formulas
and other medieval hocus-pocus, but by electron-tubes,
induction coils, switches, and control-knobs much like
those of any radio-set of today. There is only one con-
dition. The past must have been decently entombed
238 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
as sound with benefit of science. Let it escape into
space and it is lost for ever.
To be sure, the ghosts will make the same gestures,
repeat the same words. Their hands will always press
ours with the same pressure. And the aroma of the
roses of the past that we shall drink in will never
change. Yet how much more real will these electrical
phantoms be than the lifeless words of my diary :
'December 31, 1938. New Year's Eve at the Flamingo
Club with the Underwoods. Everybody very gay and
rowdy. Didn't leave until 5 a.m.' It is a pleasant
pastime to clothe such an entry with meaning. But it
requires a creative effort of the imagination. And how-
ever gratifying the result, it is a departure from reality.
What do we know of the circumstances that
attended the signing of the Treaty of Versailles? The
correspondents described the public meetings of pleni-
potentiaries in the most vivid words that they could
muster. There are men alive who were actors in that
drama. Yet what are their words compared with the
event itself ? Even the art of Shakespeare is inadequate
to describe what occurred. We want to be at the
scene see, hear, touch Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd
George, and Orlando. We want to experience the
event, participate in it. The actual life of the past
this is what we want. And science has already laid the
foundations of what may be called 'survival engineer-
ing' with the telephone, radio, television, and the art
of recording electrical and mechanical waves and
vibrations.
ELECTRIC IMMORTALITY 239
It is more than probable that your slightly ribald
great-great-grandchildren are destined to become ac-
quainted with you through your trapped ghost. * Let's
get the old boy and find out what he was like/ your
descendant says. He climbs a step-ladder, takes from a
shelf a package of sound-tracks (film or disk) to which
you are now reduced, dusts you off, and 'plays' you,
just as you play the latest dance record. And you live
again, just as you lived at the moment when the
fragrance of your boutonniere and the sight, sound,
and touch of you were translated into electric waves.
Your ghost walks, smiles, laughs, opens its arms for
an embrace.
' Why did he have to choke himself with that cravat
and collar ? ' someone asks.
' It's easy to see that our hormonic youth-preserver,
androsterone 27, had not yet been isolated,' another
will comment. * That grey hair at sixty, those
wrinkles, that leathery skin how shocking, how
unnecessary, how easily avoided! '
Magnify any sound-track and it appears as a wavy
line with curious saw-teeth, rounded humps, and
valleys. Physicists and engineers who devote their lives
to studying the mechanisms of speaking and hearing
can draw on paper almost from memory a fairly
accurate curve which means nothing to us but which
says 'boat' to their minds' ears as loudly as if the word
were yelled. In fact, a German engineer has gone so
far as to propose that motion-picture producers dis-
pense with orchestras. ' Draw on paper the kind of
240 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
wavy sound-track that musicians make when they arc
playing "The Blue Danube", transfer this either to a
phonograph disk or to a film, and you do away with
trombones, violins, clarinets, and the bother of con-
trolling a hundred men with artistic temperaments,'
runs his formula. And no audience would be the
wiser, if the draughtsman of waves has done his work
well. How easy to correct a wrong note by redrawing
an inch of the curve, or to soften an unpleasant blare
of brass 1
If this is possible now, as it is, then a century hence,
probably sooner, we shall create sense-impressions of
things that never existed. In wavy lines sound-track
banquets will be drawn at which impossible dishes
will be served, to become illusively real when 'played'
on a phonograph or run off in a motion-picture pro-
jector. Heavens and hells, angels and devils, will outdo
those of Dante and Milton because they will carry
three-dimensional, sensory conviction with them. A
new dramatic art will be born, which will demand
the combined gifts of Shakespeare, Wagner, Michel-
angelo, and of experts in the synthesis on sound-tracks
of perfumes and flavours, of tactile sensations that will
be an abyss of horror or the pinnacle of bliss. The last
vestiges of the stage will disappear. Drama will be
played in the home by actors who were never more
than figments of the imagination, never more than
ghosts, who will sing verses and utter words that
were never sung or spoken and who will walk and
live and love in palaces and gardens that were never
ELECTRIC IMMORTALITY 24!
even painted scenery. Synthetic ghosts who have their
being in a synthetic world that never could be even
the Hindu mystics never thought of that.
XVIII. Democracy and the Machine
THERE WERE MACHINES IN GEORGE WASHINGTON^ TIME.
Clocks, for example, and looms, and water-wheels,
and in England some wheezy Newcomen steam
pumps that kept mines dry. But George Washington,
for all the part he played in encouraging American
invention, never spoke of 'the machine' as he un-
doubtedly spoke of 'the church' or 'the law'. It
remained for our time to sweep into one all-embrac-
ing symbolic generalization the countless mechanisms
that light houses, drive trains, carry us across the
ocean, convey speech across continents, make clothes,
can food, build houses, dig canals, spread the voice
of an abdicating king over the whole earth, gather
and print the news of the world for presentation on
the morrow's breakfast-table.
As soon as we begin to talk about 'the machine' in
this way personages melt into a vague anonymous
background of roaring furnaces, streamlined trains,
canning-factories, gas-works, fast presses. We grew
up with heroes of invention such as Morse, Bell,
McCormick, Westinghouse, Edison, and Marconi,
but there will be fewer for our children's children to
admire. It is not that invention is in a decline but that
its character has changed. It is no longer the business
of ingenious whittlers and tinkers alone. The trained
corporation scientist and engineer already reigns.
Whether it is the making of beer-bottles or bath-
tubs, furniture or clothes, rolling and packing cigar-
ettes, we behold human capabilities multiplied a
thousandfold by fingers, hands, and arms of steel.
243
244 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
What is even more important, we behold a transfer-
ence to the machine of dexterity and something that
at times looks weirdly like intelligence, as when we
see an adding-machine totalling a column of figures;
or photoelectric cells opening and closing doors auto-
matically, counting vehicles as they pass a given point,
sorting perfect from imperfect articles on a belt, or
gauging the thickness of paper as it forms on a Four-
drinier machine.
Walk through a modern steel-mill. An overhead
crane with a single man in a cab picks up a twenty-
ton casting and lowers it neatly on a flat car. A rever-
beratory furnace is tilted and a hundred tons of white-
hot metal pour into a ladle, whereupon the ladle
travels along and pours the steel into a line of moulds,
one after the other. Not more than half a dozen men
are engaged in the whole process. And the energy at
their command! The pull of a lever, the turn of a
wheel, the movement of a switch releases ten thou-
sand, twenty thousand horse-power, whereupon huge
masses begin to move, rolls begin to turn, rails to
come out. Turn this way or that and look about for
human hands. They are there of course. Yet the mill
seems singularly empty. It is destined to be emptier
still. Even during the depression the laboratories and
development departments were recruiting designers
of new machines and draughtsmen to make working
drawings. The few machine-tenders know what is
happening and wonder wonder when more short-
cuts will be taken, when, for example, the process
DEMOCRACY AND THE MACHINE 245
of rolling will be so far developed that there will be
no more reheating from steel ingot to finished sheet,
with the consequence that more men will find them-
selves out of work.
Watch the mechanism of the wireless telephone. It
is like seeing a colossal, infallible brain at work rods
that slide up and down, links that move just so far,
selectors that pick out just the right combinations of
gears and wheels to complete just the right circuit to
ring just the right bell in response to the twisting of
a distant dial. The mechanism is beyond the grasp of
a single designer. It needs a crew of specialists. The
chief engineer sees the mechanical brain as a whole
sees in his mind's eye all those rods rising and falling
and making the right connections. But he could not
design every detail.
Or step into one of the great automobile factories.
You see a hydraulic forging-press. It costs ^30,000,
perhaps more. Essentially it is a steel fist that descends
upon a sheet of steel, squeezes it into a mould with
one relentless push, and so forms the fender of a car.
Thirty years ago fenders used to be tailored like
trousers. An ingenious mechanic might conceive the
principle of the press, so simple is it. But he could
no more specify the particular kind of steel to be used
to build it or the dimensions of the parts or the pres-
sures to be hydraulically applied, without a vast
amount of prohibitively cosdy empirical experiment-
ing, than he could smash atoms.
Individuality is disappearing more and more. In
246 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
great plants the machine-tools are set by the engineers
at the top. The man who guides a travelling crane or
who controls the motors of a rolling-mill is no more
capable of repairing the mechanism in his charge than
he is of taking the Queen Mary safely across the ocean.
He may be astoundingly skilful in his manipulation
of levers and switches, but other minds dominate the
mechanism design it, improve it, keep it in repair.
All this has been more apparent since the beginning
of the century than it was before. The average worker
did not see it clearly, but he realized that he was in
the presence of a force that could crush him. Hence
the history of invention is a history of resistance to
technological advance.
Sometimes it was the state that interfered, as it did
when Queen Elizabeth and James I refused to grant a
patent to the Reverend William Lee for his stocking-
frame, or when the manufacture of Giambattista
Carli's looms was forbidden because of the effect on
Venetian stocking-knitters, or when various German
principalities prohibited the use of the ribbon loom.
Usually it was the worker who protested. Cottage
spinners destroyed Hargreaves's jennies. Arkwright's
mechanically driven carding, roving and spinning
machines were the objects of systematic attack and the
subjects of appeals to Parliament. In the Nottingham
Luddite riots of 1811-1812 knitters destroyed machines
that could cut large pieces of inferior material into
gloves, socks, and sandals. Jacquard lamented the
demolition of the looms that he had invented for
DEMOCRACY AND THE MACHINE 247
weaving brocaded silk. The uniform-factory of Thim-
monier was destroyed in 1841 by workers who saw
nothing but starvation for them in its sewing-
machines. Threshing-machines were broken up in
England by seasonally employed farm-hands. The
same grisly fear of displacement hangs over the
worker today. Sabotage is not unknown, but a few
very strong unions can and do insist that new labour-
saving devices are not to be introduced if workers are
to be dismissed.
Paradoxical as it may seem, much invention has
been inspired by the anti-machine policy of the unions
themselves. It was they who insisted on the passage
of immigration laws which made it more difficult to
recruit cheap European labour for trench-digging or
shovelling ore in steel-mills or doing the manual work
of the mill and the mine. The result is that when
an oil or gas line is to be laid hundreds of miles, a
trench-digger now does most of the work a colossus
that buries tooth-like shovels into the ground and
gnaws its way from one end of a state to the other.
There were steam-shovels before the major restrictions
on immigration were imposed, but not the titans now
busy on the Mesabi Range, where iron is dug up at
the surface like so much dirt. We had labour-saving
machines when wages were far lower than they are
now. The point is that when wages go up it becomes
possible, even necessary from a business angle, to
invent machines of a new type and of unprecedented
productivity. When, therefore, a manufacturer pro-
248 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
tests against fresh demands for higher wages or
shorter hours and vows that he must either close or
move to non-union territory, or when a financier
decides that he will not invest his money in an in-
dustry because of high labour costs and small profits,
he assumes that production costs cannot be reduced,
that inventors are unable to meet the exigencies of a
new situation.
In the decade from 1920 to 1930, one of steadily
rising wages, the nation's output increased 46 per cent,
but the labour force only 16 per cent. It would be
fallacious to attribute this remarkable decline in
opportunities entirely to new and more complicated
inventions; yet Mr. David Weintraub, a close student
of technological trends, finds 'a meaning' in the per-
centage which it is the purpose of detailed studies now
under way to define.
But more than the effect of invention on the worker
is involved. The tireless machine is the despot of our
age. 'Regimentation' is an overworked word, but we
must invoke it. The machine stands for mass produc-
tion. And mass production means regimentation on a
vast scale what the engineers more politely call stan-
dardization. It is the machine in the last analysis that
makes us dress more or less alike, ride in automobiles
that are more or less alike, see at night by lamps that
are absolutely alike, live in houses that resemble one
another and are even identical when they are built in
rows for the occupancy of mill-hands, eat canned and
packaged foods that are indistinguishable from one
DEMOCRACY AND THE MACHINE 249
another. Fifteen million people a day see precisely the
same films. Donald Duck is as familiar to western
ranchers as to Rumanian shopkeepers on New York's
East Side. By radio an entire continent listens to some
popular comedian who is 'sponsored' by an oil-refin-
ing company with gasolene to sell. Water comes from
a common reservoir, gas from a common gasometer,
electricity from a common central station. Living has
become a collectivistic activity. For life in Lima, Ohio,
in its technological aspects is much like life in Chicago,
San Francisco, or New York. Collectivism is forced
upon us whether we want it or not.
Mass consumption, mass recreation, mass distribu-
tion of energy, and the collectivistic utilization of
identical things are impossible without control of mass
production, without organization. The inventors have
standardized behaviour, pleasures, tastes. There is less
freedom than there was a century ago because of in-
vention; there will be still less tomorrow. The patents
speak eloquently enough on the point. In the first
third of the twentieth century 1,330,000 were granted
in this country, with more than that number expected
in the second third. Few are supremely important, but
their increasing number indicates that technological
thinking is more than ever directed towards utilizing
energy for the production of goods.
Control. Organization. Without them mass produc-
tion is impossible.
Who are the controllers, the organizers? A few
experts at the top of the pyramid efficiency engineers
250 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
who see to it that even the hugest steel-mill operates
as if it were a single organism with a super-machine-
tender in charge called the 'superintendent'; hired
designers or inventors of ever more complicated
automatic labour-saving devices; technicians who do
nothing but keep the machines in perfect condition.
They constitute a new caste that owes its station not
to birth or privilege but to sheer ability and oppor-
tunity.
Strange to relate, these rulers are themselves ruled
by their own inventions. The standardization that
they have insisted upon because mass production is
impossible without it also restricts them. There is no
phonograph monopoly, yet no wide use has yet been
made of Poulsen's telegraphone which was invented
late in the last century to record a whole opera electro-
magnetically on a steel wire. The reason? Scores of
millions invested in standardized disks on which the
music of great artists has been engraved. Monorail way
systems have been designed with an astonishing atten-
tion to detail, with gyroscopically controlled trains
that can make 150 miles an hour on a single rail and
dash across an abyss on a steel cable. Have they a
chance? Not against a highly standardized railway
network which sprawls over a continent, with stan-
dardized trains stopping at standardized stations and
barely scraping standardized bridges with smokestacks
of a standard height.
How many aristocrats of test-tube, electromagnet
and gear-wheel are there? No one knows. The total
DEMOCRACY AND THE MACHINE 25!
for the world cannot be more than a million, with
perhaps two hundred thousand in the United States.
Suppose they were to perish in a night these million.
Back we would slip to the eighteenth century.
People in cities would starve to death or die in two
weeks of epidemics.
With experts on top of the structure inventing and
controlling the mechanism, and, above these, finan-
ciers who rule all, what is to become of us? We are
brought face to face with the problem of government.
Democracy as we know it is a social and political
conception of the eighteenth century. There were no
steam-engines, no railway trains, no gas-works, no
central stations, no machines to turn out thousands
of cigarettes a minute or seal thousands of cans of
tomatoes an hour or bend, twist, punch, and squeeze
steel for skyscrapers and ocean liners. Liberty, equal-
ity, fraternity ! They are brave words, words that still
thrill men who stand at blast-furnaces or who dip ore
out of Great Lake freighters with gigantic electric
shovels or feed bars of steel to an 'automatic' which
converts them into threaded bolts. Yet there is no
denying that as against a ruling military caste of
hereditary aristocrats, invention has another ruling
caste of technologists and financiers. And the new
ruling class is far more powerful than the old. It has
had to be curbed by such democratic devices as com-
pensation laws, shorter working-days, unions, inter-
state commerce and federal trade commissions, public
service commissions.
252 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
The curbs are the evidences of a deep conviction
that the very existence of democracy is at stake. Is it
compatible with technoculture? Social problems have
become largely technological problems. On the one
hand we have democracy trying to settle by popular
vote highly intricate problems of finance, taxation,
arising out of invention; on the other a colossal
mechanism of production, designed and operated by
highly competent experts who are guiding our lives.
So we ask : are the technical experts to run a whole
nation because they happen to run its industrial
machinery? Or is the government to run the experts,
the inventors, the creators of this evolving culture?
The totalitarian states have made up their minds.
Their dictators have decided that the course of
scientific research and of invention must be socially
directed. The 260 research laboratories of Soviet
Russia take their orders from the Academy of Sciences,
and the Academy is an integral part of the govern-
ment. Germany achieves what is possible in economic
self-sufficiency by indicating to the university and
industrial laboratories exactly what discoveries and
inventions are wanted. Mussolini has a national re-
search council which is primarily concerned with
Italy's industrial problems. Every totalitarian state
plans for the future and holds scientific research to the
plan.
To an engineer this is a wholly satisfactory method
of dealing with what is called 'the impact of science
and invention*. To him there need be no violent,
DEMOCRACY AND THE MACHINE 253
destructive collision between human rights and
methods of production if there is a social plan. Dis-
cover human needs, is his formula. List them. Satisfy
them with the aid of trained groups of chemists and
engineers. Let a highly competent government direc-
torate of scientific research assign the problems to
various laboratories. Planning implies strict control.
Society must be told what is good for it. Design society
as you would a locomotive, and run it as if it were a
railway train. Fascism and Communism have both
tried to apply the formula.
Planning is distasteful to a democracy. It clashes
with individualism, with the egalitarian right of every
voter to decide what he wants his government to be
and to do. So instead of the clear-cut programme of
totalitarian and Communistic states we have much
floundering. It is not that democracy is unaware of
its danger, but that it does not quite know how it
shall deal with the machine and the social problems
that it has raised. In President Hoover's time, we had
the report of a committee on 'social trends', which
discovered that social invention lagged behind techno-
logical invention, meaning that some social mechan-
ism must be devised to soften the impact of science
and invention. President Roosevelt appointed the
National Science Advisory Board, which insisted that
we needed new industries to absorb the unemployed
and that inventions in the long run always create new
industries. It went so far as to indicate what problems
should be assigned to research physicists, chemists and
254 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
engineers in a systematic effort thus to cope with
the economic problems of the depression. We have
also had the report on 'technological trends' by the
National Resources Committee, an attempt at predict-
ing what Mr H. G. Wells calls 'the shape of things to
come' on the theory that if we can foresee that shape
we may be able to avert the disastrous consequences of
carelessly introducing the formidable inventions that
are even now in the making. The prophets who wrote
that report argued that it takes from twenty to thirty
years for industry to adopt a revolutionary invention
time enough to read the handwriting on the wall,
time enough to foresee more obvious social effects,
time enough to prepare for the inevitable by formulat-
ing adequate legislative and economic policies.
There are manifest impossibilities in thus attempt-
ing to predict the shape of things to come and prepar-
ing for them. Did Arkwright foresee the slum when
he transferred the textile industry to the factory? Or
Watt when he converted Newcomen's mine pump
into a steam-engine capable of driving other machines ?
Did Daimler, Duryea and Ford imagine that the auto-
mobile would transform rural education, reduce rail-
way dividends to zero, and inspire 500,000 Americans
to lead a gipsy life in trailers ? Did Whitney know that
his cotton-gin would revive a dying slavery and that a
civil war would have to be fought to settle some of the
issues raised? Or did Otis and his backers realize that
his elevator would give us the skyscraper and with it
an increase in real-estate values and a problem in trans-
DEMOCRACY AND THE MACHINE 255
portation whenever a single building discharges on
the sidewalk some 50,000 people between five and six
o'clock ?
Shall it be planned totalitarianism or an adaptable
democracy in which social invention rises to meet the
human demands of mechanical invention? No one
knows. But some form of collectivism is already
emerging, simply because mass production, mass enter-
tainment, mass communication, mass appeal, all that
we call 'the machine', will have it so. The greatest of
all inventions will be the social invention that will
make the most of science and technology socially in
terms of human happiness.
There are signs enough that democracy can invent
socially and save itself from the dictatorial planning
of Fascism and Communism. Invention as we see it
has grown up in a profit-making society. Whether or
not a given machine shall be introduced still depends
therefore on its money-making future. No better
example can be found than in the electrical industry.
Central stations were at first naturally erected in
crowded communities where purchasers of energy
were huddled together and where it paid to install a
complex generating, transmitting and distributing
system. But the farmer? He was utterly ignored. Even
now he is no better off (except in the irrigated West)
than he was in the days of McKinley, so far as electric
motors and lights are concerned. There are only three
of him to the average rural mile. Unless he pays for
the transformers and the distribution system that
256 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
makes it possible to reduce to no or 115 volts the
ioo,ooo-volt current that flows in the high-tension lines
strung perhaps across his very land, he must burn
kerosene and his wife must do without electric re-
frigeration and wash clothes by hand.
The Tennessee Valley Authority and similar organi-
zations, so bitterly opposed by public utility com-
panies, must be regarded as quasi-social inventions
that set the benefits of electricity above profits. Possibly
the avowed object of obtaining yardsticks whereby
rates are set will not be attained. But whether or not
it is attained there can be no question of the change
that will be brought about not so much on the farm
itself as in the barnyard and the home. In the days of
the old National Electric Light Association the prob-
lem was attacked from the viewpoint of deliberately
finding profitable new rural uses for electricity, so that
enough current would be consumed to justify the erec-
tion of poles and distributing apparatus at a cost that
the farmer would be willing to pay. Yet the history of
all public utilities is a history of services and uses that
consumers discovered for themselves. For example,
Bell never dreamed that some day a resident of New
York would call up his brother in San Francisco to
congratulate him on having attained his fiftieth birth-
day. Nor did Marconi suspect that fishermen would
regulate their catches by market demand ascertained
by wireless. Nor were the gas companies, which did
their best to thwart Edison in his effort to introduce
electric lighting, able to see at first that gas would be
DEMOCRACY AND THE MACHINE 257
used for cooking to the almost complete exclusion of
coal in cities. In the end electricity triumphed. It took
its place in the community not as a competitor of gas
but as a new force of unlimited social potentialities.
Now it is recognized that energy is warp and woof of
our industrial and domestic life. Without it we would
slip back to the early nineteenth century. So powerful
an agency cannot be left in the control of profit-
making exploiters. The public service commissions
may be inefficient, but they testify eloquently enough
to the determination of democracy not to be ruled by
a class of bankers and engineers who have decided in
their own minds where high-tension lines shall be
strung and to what regions electric energy shall be
distributed.
Even more striking is the social evolution of the
railroad. At first the steam locomotive was simply an
iron horse that competed with living horses. Then it
became a powerful factor in opening up new land in
the Middle West and in developing new industrial
centres. Its full significance burst upon us during the
World War, when it was recognized by the masses for
what it was a colossal transportation-machine sprawl-
ing over a continent, linking thousands of towns
together. We talked of transportation with a capital
T. When the war ended, the question arose whether
or not the roads should be returned to private owner-
ship and management. Their subsequent history is
probably the eventual history of all public utilities,
possibly of all major industries based on great inven-
R
258 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
tions. In other words, transportation, the generation of
gas and electricity, the supplying of water to a com-
munity, the production of food, clothing, and shelter,
can no more be left to private capital than the exploita-
tion of the atmosphere for breathing. We behold the
railroads transformed by democracy into real servants
of the public. The conditions under which their
managers employ labour, the issuance of securities, the
rates to be charged for carrying goods and passengers
all are subject to governmental scrutiny and
approval. The railway companies are reduced to the
status of administrators. They may not even give up
an unprofitable branch-line without the government's
consent, and, against their will, they must apply the
profits earned in crowded communities to the main-
tenance of transportation in regions where traffic is
thin. We have here about the most striking example
to be found of democracy's ability to invent to good
social purpose and to appraise the social importance
of a scientific discovery or invention.
Invention and science are Siamese twins. Sometimes
a science develops out of an invention as thermo-
dynamics developed out of research applied to the
steam-engine, and sometimes inventions flow from
scientific discoveries, as, for example, the generator,
telegraph, and the whole apparatus of modern elec-
trical engineering flowed out of Faraday's work in
electromagnetic induction. Even under despotism
some research, some invention, is possible. But the
onward impetus that comes from the slow acceptance
DEMOCRACY AND THE MACHINE 259
:> new theories which may conflict with those gener-
ally accepted, ceases. If, for example, the world had
not ultimately accepted the Copernican conception of
:he solar system it would have managed to do its
navigation after a fashion in accordance with the
Ptolemaic system. But there could have been no New-
ion, no laws of gravitation, and hence nothing like the
mechanical engineering that has given us modern
industry.
Now it happens that science stands for something
nore than coal-tar dyes, electric lamps, X-rays, radio-
ictivity, and monstrous fruit-flies bred by experimental
geneticists. It is an attitude of mind, an objective, dis-
passionate approach to the outer world what Prof
Whitehead calls 'the most intimate change in outlook
:hat the human race has yet encountered'. This atti-
tude, this objectivity, is inconceivable without freedom
:>f thought and freedom of expression. It is no acci-
dent, therefore, that science, as we know it, should
)e an offspring of democracy, no accident that the
discoveries of Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, and others
were made during revolutions fomented by liberals.
All this being so and the case has been convinc-
ingly presented by historians of science and political
philosophers the advocates of a society planned from
3n high, with the necessary suppression of free
thought, face a dilemma. They need the scientist. Yet
:hey must deny him the liberty of mind that is the
very essence of his objective attitude. If his researches
relentlessly expose the fallacy of a fundamental prin-
260 SCIENCE TODAY AND TOMORROW
ciple dinned into the populace by the government,
either he must be hanged as a meddler or the social
plan must be scrapped. In the modern totalitarian state
there is exile or death for the dissenter and not a sign
of scrapping.
Clashes of free scientific thought, of scientific objec-
tivity with authority, are familiar enough. They bode
no good fcr research and hence no good for invention.
Social planning of the totalitarian, autarchic type, is
impossible so long as the scientist is denied the right
to think for himself and to carry his thinking into
practice.
The votaries of science constitute an international
brotherhood the like of which this world has never
seen before. It is impossible to say of a discovery or an
invention : ' This was the work of a German/ Nor
does it matter much to a real scientist or engineer what
the nationality of a discoverer or inventor may be. It
is enough for him that the man did his work and
described it in a readily accessible publication as an
addition to the general stock of knowledge. As a force
in achieving true internationalism even religion pales
in comparison with this subordination of self and
country. Despite the secrecy that shrouds military and
civil invention, science furnishes the most striking
evidence we have that men are able to sink passions
for the good of the race.
Hope, then, lies in science. If democracy is to save
itself, the scientific outlook, the scientific method of
detached appraisal of facts and situations, must become
DEMOCRACY AND THE MACHINE 261
part and parcel of the common mind. This in turn
means that education must be given new purpose, and
direction. Or as Wells puts it, the choice is between
'chaos and education'.
There are signs that even without adequate educa-
tion and the general inculcation of the scientific atti-
tude the masses of democracy are beginning to turn
instinctively to the scientist and the engineer. There
has been much scoffing at 'brain trusts', but the fact
must not be overlooked that, inept as they have been
on occasion, they have emerged from the orderly pro-
cess of democratic government. Their British counter-
parts are found in royal commissions that patiently
examine proposals and decide whether or not they
meet the social needs of the hour. It is much that in
two great democracies the scientific expert is thus
drawn into the government, even though his recom-
mendation may be brushed aside. For all its emotion-
alism, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the
electorate does somehow sense the relationship of
science to democracy, that already it dimly recognizes
in science the saviour of democracy and the early
perceptible beginning of an internationalism that may
yet sweep away the artificial barriers that have been
raised to check the free intermingling of peoples,
goods, and ideas.
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