Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/155

Rh difference in value and efficiency to be observed between work of brain and work of muscle alone.

Meantime the worker receives larger wages; each dollar will buy more of the necessaries of life, vastly more of its comforts. Clothing is better, cheaper and more plentiful; food is better, of greater variety and is easier obtained; wages have gone up and prices have gone down; the average citizen finds it easier to secure employment at remunerative wages; he secures a larger and a larger proportion of the earnings of capital and labor, and he obtains more opportunities for incidental profit and for paying investments of his more easily acquired savings. The savings banks of the country are now finding difficulty in caring for his accumulations, while the larger capitalist is finding no less difficulty in securing a fair return on invested capital in large amounts.

Twenty years ago, when preparing the second annual address of the then President of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, I wrote:

"I have sometimes said that the world was waiting for the appearance of three great inventors, yet unknown, for whom it has in store honors and emoluments far exceeding all ever yet accorded to any one of their predecessors.

"The first is the man who is to show how, by the consumption of coal, we may directly produce electricity, and thus, perhaps, evade that now inevitable and enormous loss that comes of the utilization of energy in all heat-engines driven by substances of variable volume. Our electrical engineers have this great step still to take, and are apparently not likely soon to gain the prize that may yet reward some genius yet to be born.

"The second of these greatest inventors is he who will teach us the source of the beautiful soft-beaming light of the firefly and the glow-worm, and will show us how to produce this singular illuminant, and to apply it-with success practically and commercially. This wonderful light, free from heat and from consequent loss of energy, is nature's substitute for the crude and extravagantly wasteful lights of which we have, through so many years, been foolishly boasting. The dynamo-electrical engineer has nearly solved this problem. Let us hope that it may be soon fully solved, and by one of those among our own colleagues who are now so earnestly working in this field, and that we may all live to see him steal the glow-worm's light, and to see the approaching days of Vril predicted so long ago by Lord Lytton.

"The third great genius is the man who is to fulfil Darwin's prophecy (1759), closing the stanza:

 Soon shall thy arm, unconquered steam, afar Drag the slow barge or drive the rapid car, Or, on wide-waving wings expanded bear The flying chariot through the fields of air."

Of these three inventors none has yet appeared, and their coming may prove to be the great events of the twentieth century. The task set for the first has been often attacked by later men of science, and especially the chemists; but, while some real progress has been made, the purpose of this inventor is not accomplished and seems little, if any,