with the common things of this world once they had heard this
voice. And mostly they believed not only that all this world was
as it were a painted curtain before things unguessed at, but that
these secrets were Power. Hitherto Power had come to men by
chance, but now there were these seekers seeking, seeking among
rare and curious and perplexing objects, sometimes finding some
odd utilisable thing, sometimes deceivingthemselves with fancied
discovery, sometimes pretending to find. The world of every day
laughed at these eccentric beings, or found them annoying and
ill-treated them, or was seized with fear and made saints and
sorcerers and warlocks of them, or with covetousness and
entertained them hopefully; but for the greater part heeded them
not at all. Yet they were of the blood of him who had first
dreamt of attacking the mammoth; every one of them was of his
blood and descent; and the thing they sought, all unwittingly,
was the snare that will some day catch the sun.
Section 3
Such a man was that Leonardo da Vinci, who went about the court
of Sforza in Milan in a state of dignified abstraction. His
common-place books are full of prophetic subtlety and ingenious
anticipations of the methods of the early aviators. Durer was his
parallel and Roger Bacon-whom the Franciscans silenced-of his
kindred. Such a man again in an earlier city was Hero of
Alexandria, who knew of the power of steam nineteen hundred years
before it was first brought into use. And earlier still was
Archimedes of Syracuse, and still earlier the legendary Daedalus
of Cnossos. All up and down the record of history whenever there
was a little leisure from war and brutality the seekers appeared.
And half the alchemists were of their tribe.
When Roger Bacon blew up his first batch of gunpowder one might
have supposed that men would have gone at once to the explosive
engine. But they could see nothing of the sort. They were not
yet beginning to think of seeing things; their metallurgy was all
too poor to make such engines even had they thought of them. For
a time they could not make instruments sound enough to stand this
new force even for so rough a purpose as hurling a missile. Their
first guns had barrels of coopered timber, and the world waited
for more than five hundred years before the explosive engine
came.
Even when the seekers found, it was at first a long journey
before the world could use their findings for any but the
roughest, most obvious purposes. If man in general was not still
as absolutely blind to the unconquered energies about him as his
paleolithic precursor, he was at best purblind.
Section 4
The latent energy of coal and the power of steam waited long on
the verge of discovery, before they began to influence human
lives.
There were no doubt many such devices as Hero's toys devised and
forgotten, time after time, in courts and palaces, but it needed
that coal should be mined and burning with plenty of iron at hand
before it dawned upon men that here was something more than a
curiosity. And it is to be remarked that the first recorded
suggestion for the use of steam was in war; there is an
Elizabethan pamphlet in which it is proposed to fire shot out of
corked iron bottles full of heated water. The mining of coal for
fuel, the smelting of iron upon a larger scale than men had ever
done before, the steam pumping engine, the steam-engine and the
steam-boat, followed one another in an order that had a kind of
logical necessity. It is the most interesting and instructive
chapter in the history of the human intelligence, the history of
steam from its beginning as a fact in human consciousness to the
perfection of the great turbine engines that preceded the
utilisation of intra-molecular power. Nearly every human being
must have seen steam, seen it incuriously for many thousands of
years; the women in particular were always heating water, boiling
it, seeing it boil away, seeing the lids of vessels dance with
its fury; millions of people at different times must have watched
steam pitching rocks out of volcanoes like cricket balls and
blowing pumice into foam, and yet you may search the whole human
record through, letters, books, inscriptions, pictures, for any
glimmer of a realisation that here was force, here was strength
to borrow and use… Then suddenly man woke up to it, the
railways spread like a network over the globe, the ever enlarging
iron steamships began their staggering fight against wind and
wave.
Steam was the first-comer in the new powers, it was the beginning
of the Age of Energy that was to close the long history of the
Warring States.
But for a long time men did not realise the importance of this
novelty. They would not recognise, they were not able to
recognise that anything fundamental had happened to their
immemorial necessities. They called the steam-engine the 'iron
horse' and pretended that they had made the most partial of
substitutions. Steam machinery and factory production were
visibly revolutionising the conditions of industrial production,
population was streaming steadily in from the country-side and
concentrating in hitherto unthought-of masses about a few city
centres, food was coming to them over enormous distances upon a
scale that made the one sole precedent, the corn ships of
imperial Rome, a petty incident; and a huge migration of peoples
between Europe and Western Asia and America was in Progress,
and-nobody seems to have realised that something new had come
into human life, a strange swirl different altogether from any
previous circling and mutation, a swirl like the swirl when at
last the lock gates begin to open after a long phase of
accumulating water and eddying inactivity…
The sober Englishman at the close of the nineteenth century could
sit at his breakfast-table, decide between tea from Ceylon or
coffee from Brazil, devour an egg from France with some Danish
ham, or eat a New Zealand chop, wind up his breakfast with a West
Indian banana, glance at the latest telegrams from all the world,
scrutinise the prices current of his geographically distributed
investments in South Africa, Japan, and Egypt, and tell the two
children he had begotten (in the place of his father's eight)
that he thought the world changed very little. They must play
cricket, keep their hair cut, go to the old school he had gone
to, shirk the lessons he had shirked, learn a few scraps of
Horace and Virgil and Homer for the confusion of cads, and all
would be well with them…
Section 5
Electricity, though it was perhaps the earlier of the two to be
studied, invaded the common life of men a few decades after the