THE AGE OF MARVELS

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Sep 30, 1889

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 15, No. 38.

THE AGE OF MARVELS.

FIFTEEN years ago it was a very common opinion that there was no important inventions left to be made. There might and would be improvements, but nothing revolutionary. The telegraph was the most perfect conceivable mode of communication, and there were physical difficulties that would limit the possible speed of railroad trains to sixty or seventy miles an hour, and of ships to twenty or twenty-five knots.

To-day we are visibly entering upon a period of invention never approached in history. Nobody ventures to predict its possible limits. We have learned to talk to people a thousand miles away, and Edison promises to make us see them. We can petrify our speech for the benefit of future generations, so that our dead voices will speak to our descendants when we are not even in memory,—if we ever die, for science is venturing even to attack death itself.

Within the next two or three years the transportation system of the world will probably be revolutionized. Inventors in two different lines each promise us a speed of from 100 to 300 miles an hour. Electricity and water are the rival agents. In the new electric road the train is drawn forward by the suction of charged coils of wire. On the water road the cars have no wheels, but slide on runners supported on thin films of water. In both cases the extraordinary speed and steadiness of motion are due to the fact that the action is continuous, like that of gravitation. A falling body goes faster and faster until, if the distance traversed be great enough, its speed is almost infinite. In the new trains there is no reciprocating motion, like that of a piston, with its continual stopping, reversing and jerking. There is a steady pull, constantly accumulating force and speed without jar.

It seems to be the mere extravagance of incredulity to doubt the genuineness of these inventions. The Weems electric road has been repeatedly illustrated and described in lay and scientific journals for months past. The sliding water road is described by one of those ponderous British newspapers that never perpetrates a hoax, as in actual operation at the Paris Exhibition. Perhaps by the time the World's Fair of 1892 opens in New York we shall be able to leave our work in San Francisco on Saturday, take a look at the show and go back again on Monday.—San Francisco Examiner.