Page:Man's Machine-Made Millennium.djvu/6

576 evening, a howling New York farce, to be followed by three days of grand opera sent in from St. Petersburg.

On the great ocean liners passengers may at will enjoy drama, tragedy, or grand opera from New York, Paris, London, Berlin, Tokio, or Peking; and the cost of such a voyage will not be greater than the expense of a present day's outing.

Recent experiments have renewed the hope of the old alchemists that we may yet transmute the baser metals into gold. If we succeed, then gold will find new and extensive uses. Gold, slightly alloyed, would make ideal rifle balls, for it could be made to possess exactly the requisite hardness, while its density would give projectiles a tremendous carrying and penetrating power. Such a bullet would be recommended by the peace men, for who would not prefer a gold bullet to a lead one healed in his flesh?

The inventor of the first machine gun provided it with one barrel for shooting round bullets, and one barrel for shooting square bullets, the round bullets being for Christians and the square bullets for Turks. It is hard to make bullets of any description kind, but the round gold bullet would be the most merciful.

The warfare of the future will be like a chess tournament. Every move will be under the eyes of the world, for concealment and secret maneuvers will be impossible. Newspapers will have their aerial scouts hovering over camp and fleet and field, and every move of ocean craft or land squadron will be reproduced on maps in every stock-exchange and newspaper office throughout the world, and each move will be the study, plan, and conjecture of thousands of observers.

In 1896, at Faraday House, in London, I conducted some experiments with electric furnaces and succeeded in making microscopic diamonds by electro-deposition. I have since then been hoping to take up the work again. I am confident that either by the process I then discovered, or by some other, diamonds will soon be made cheaply and plentifully and large in size.

Artificial diamonds are needed much more in the arts than they are as gems. I predict that diamonds will soon be made so cheaply that they will be no more expensive than many other electro-chemical products. Diamonds as large as peas will then be sold at twenty-five cents each with a profit, and diamonds as large as the Kohinoor will not cost more than a dollar.

THE COMING CITY

The stranger visiting New York is awestruck by the sky-piercing office-buildings; but could that stranger go to sleep as Rip Van Winkle did and return after a few centuries he would find the larger part of the present city razed to earth and rebuilt, and from the old foundations would rise up monumental structures compared with which our mightiest buildings of to-day would be as a hunter's cabin of logs and boughs.

Instead of individual buildings, disunited and independent in architecture, that great city of the future will be as one enormous edifice. The present streets upon the surface of the ground will become the basement, and the business thoroughfares will be upon an enormous platform a story high; and stupendous banks of streets, arcades and corridors, parks and playgrounds will rise one above another, tier on tier, to eye-tiring heights, supported by vast columns several blocks in diameter at the base, traversed by great streets and thoroughfares and rising to a height of two thousand feet or more. Each tower will be so built as amply to house several hundred thousand persons, and there will be homes in sky-hung parks and gardens up in the clear, cool, pure air, and from their commercial work down near the earth business men will take express elevators to their homes in a veritable "airy, fairy dreamland of nightingales," where the clouds hover and smile in the evening sun long after the ink of night has engulfed the lower floors.

Viewed from a distance, the great city will have the aspect of a frail structure of webs and ribbons of steel through which the sun and air will find a freer access to the earth than they now find between the present city walls.

At night, when the millions of lights emblazon the sky and throw their united fire far into the outer dark, the city will resemble an enormous torch about which fast-fleeting flying-machines will flit and plunge like giant moths about a giant flame.

The night sky of the suburban dweller of that millennial time will be made meteoric with luminescent cloud-racing craft whose radiance will dim the stars and shame the envious moon.