Science in the New Century
By Frederick Dolman. The Strand Magazine, January, 1901.
Sir William Crookes, with whom I had a short conversation in his working-room—half laboratory and half study—at his residence in Kensington Park Gardens, declared at the outset that such a forecast as I proposed to him must necessarily be limited in scope to the application of existing ideas.
“I was reading recently,” he remarked, “Mr. H. G. Wells’s ‘When the Sleeper Awakens,’ and I found that every one of the things imagined by the author to have taken place was merely a further extension of something which we have already. I have no doubt, in my own mind, for example, that the next century will see a great multiplication of ‘twopenny tubes.’ We shall have every house in London connected with every other house by telephone. The phonograph will be in common use. I don’t feel certain that London will be covered with glass, although, in my opinion, our cities would be much more comfortable if one could go out and about regardless of rain, cold, and fog. But all this, you will say, represents no fresh achievement on the part of science. Well, I might add the flying machine, which is almost sure to be perfected some time next century. Aerial navigation is now, I believe, only a matter of money. If only Governments would devote big sums to its solution the problem would soon be solved.”
This view, readers will note, is in direct opposition to that which another eminent chemist—Sir William Preece—expressed to me. Sir William Crookes had seemingly been much more impressed by Count Zeppelin’s recent experiments.
“For the rest,” Sir William proceeded, “I can only say that it is very often the unexpected which happens. It is my belief that after the telephone and the more recent discovery of ‘radium’ scientists will be very chary of using the word ‘impossible.’ We all thought the idea of the telephone preposterous. We knew that certain sounds could be projected from a piece of iron, but to suppose that all the varied intonations of the human voice could be so conveyed was impossible. Yet it is so, although I, for one, confess that even now I do not understand why it should be so. As regards ‘radium,’ little or nothing can be said at the moment from the practical point of view. But, as an example of seemingly continuous energy—something of which we had previously no conception—who can tell of what fresh achievement it may he the forerunner?”
Sir William Crookes did not tell me—as he might well have done—that he himself was on the verge of discovering the Röntgen rays some years before the German scientist bestowed upon the world this valuable aid to the surgeon’s art. This interesting circumstance was incidentally mentioned to me a day or two later, when I called upon Mr. J. W. Swan, F.R.S., the electrician and inventor, in Holland Park.
“I remember Sir William,” said Mr. Swan, “once showing me just such rays in the course of some experiments he was making with phosphorescent effects, although neither he nor I had any idea as to their extraordinary penetrative effect. On another occasion, it seems, Sir William complained of some finger-marks on photographic plates which he attributed to carelessness in manufacture, although there can now be little doubt that they were brought about by his own work in producing X-rays, as they are now called.”
My conversation with Mr. Swan, whose incandescent lamp associates his name with that of Edison, suggested that one of the greatest achievements of the twentieth century may be the substitution of some new chemical for the present mechanical method of generating electricity.
“At present, of course,” Mr. Swan remarked, “the chemical method is much the more difficult and expensive. At this Holland Park Station on the New Central London Railway machinery of something like 3,000 horse-power is employed to generate the electricity for driving the trains and lifts and for the lighting. Well, at the present time an incalculable number of batteries would be required to provide an equivalent amount of electricity. For the time being the attempt to generate electricity chemically has been almost abandoned. Yet in some respects the electric current would be more convenient in the form of a battery than it is distributed from a generating station, and there is no reason in the nature of the case why some fresh discovery in the new century should not show that it can be produced chemically with much greater cheapness, although I don’t profess to have any idea what sort of discovery it will be.
“The increasing cost of motive-power will probably stimulate efforts in this direction. More general use and further improvement in lamps will doubtless cheapen electric light very much, but, after all, the great impediment is the increasing cost of motive-power. It is true that we get out of coal only from 10 to 15 per cent. of the energy it contains, and many efforts have been made to prevent this waste, but, so far, without success.”
“Then you are not too sanguine, Mr. Swan, that in the new century Electra will become a sort of omnipotent fairy, doing all the hard work in daily life?”
“No, although I have no doubt that the use of electricity in industries, both large and small, will be much extended. But I don’t think it likely that it will be found advantageous for, say, cleaning the windows and scrubbing the floors of our houses, as imaginative writers have suggested, although a few people may choose to employ it as an exquisite way of having such things done. Nor would I dare to commit myself to the opinion that, in the next century, electricity will entirely supersede gas as an illuminant.”
As might be expected, electricity was much in evidence in Mr. Swan’s own house; everywhere electric lights and bells, of course, whilst in the drawing-room I noticed an electrophone, and in the extensive basement inspected several laboratories and workshops wherein such motive-power as is required proceeds from electricity.
(From the Internet Archive)
