Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/53

Rh its steadiness. So it has happened that the nineteenth century has illustrated such an apparent, though not real, exception to the law. The forces of civilization had been cumulative; the resultant forces gathering through the earlier ages, partly stored and latent, but none the less potential, and partly as the actual and kinetic energies of phenomena of visible evolution. All energies seem to have become kinetic and visible in their aggregate results in this Victorian Era. The outcome has been described as a 'tidal wave' of upward and onward movement on the sea of universal progress, a climax of an evolution of which the earlier periods have been quiet and silent and simply those of preparation. It has been like the action of the seas beating upon a yielding shore. Slowly and steadily through the ages it cuts farther and farther into the obstruction, unobserved and unrealized as a great natural movement, until, at last, the dike is cut through and the ocean rushes in and overflows the land. This flood, beneficent as the other might be destructive, has had a somewhat similar history. The nineteenth century is the period of uprush and inrush of the flood of efficiently applied human intellect, making effective alall [sic] those powers which have been till now frittered away, the magnificent potentialities of which have never been before realized.

This volcanic development of previously latent, but gathering and cumulative, energy has been effective in every department of human activity, but most of all, perhaps, in the field of invention, of the mechanic arts, of what we have come to-day to designate 'mechanical engineering.' The acceleration has been one beside which that of the falling stone or a dropping shot or the meteor precipitated into the field of attraction of our globe seems insignificant in resultant effects. In the year 1800 we had not a locomotive or a railroad for public service in the world. To-day the United States alone, with half the mileage of the world, possess 200,000 miles, nearly, of rail and about 40,000 locomotives. Then we had no telegraph; to-day its wires span the continents and carry messages along the bed of every ocean, binding the continents as with ties of steel. Over three millions of miles of wire transmit three hundred to four hundred millions of messages annually, and nations are brought within speaking distance and bound heart to heart. The events of the antipodes are signalled to us, hour by hour, as they occur, and we read at the breakfast table of battles, coronations, deaths and births of individuals and of nations, of all the great phenomena of a world, from Atlantic to Pacific and to Atlantic again, and almost from pole to pole.