Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 88.djvu/9

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HE progress due to science and invention in America, which makes this Twentieth Century so wonderful, so rich, is a tribute to the vision of a blind man.

The science department in every university, the technical schools, owe more to him than to any other one personal force.

Hundreds of thousands in this generation whose success is due to him, or who are benefiting through the work he did, do not even know the name of Edward Livingston Youmans.

In his lifetime this self-taught man was recognized as the best informed intelligence in the nation, and he has been dead not thirty years.

Youmans' work can be summed up in four words: He made science popular.

In teaching himself the sciences, handicapped as he was with blindness, Youmans realized the barriers of learning within which scientific men have isolated themselves.

Since the time, more than two thousand years ago, when Archimedes discovered the lever, the pulley and the screw, since the day science was born, in fact, scientists have been an exclusive folk, a sort of high priesthood.

They share their knowledge with each other. None but the elect are permitted to enter within their circle. Their constant excuse has always been, is now, that without technical mastery there can be no science and that only the trained mind can understand technicalities.

When Youmans began his life work seventy years ago he realized his mission was that of an interpreter.

He knew that science must become a part of the daily life of human beings, if civilization was to go forward. His own experience proved to him how difficult it was to get the necessary knowledge.