and industry. There had been exactly four decades of steam navigation
on American waters. Railways were growing at the rate of nearly
one thousand miles annually. Gas had become familiar as a means of
illumination in large cities. Looms and tools and printing-presses were
everywhere being liberated from the slow toil of man-power. The first
photographs had been taken. Chloroform, nitrous oxide gas, and ether
had been placed at the service of the physician in saving life, and
the revolver, guncotton, and nitroglycerine added to the agencies for
slaughter. New metals, chemicals, and elements had become available in
large numbers, gases had been liquefied and solidified, and the range
of useful heat and cold indefinitely extended. The safety-lamp had been
given to the miner, the caisson to the bridge-builder, the anti-friction
metal to the mechanic for bearings. It was already known how to
vulcanize rubber, and how to galvanize iron. The application of
machinery in the harvest-field had begun with the embryonic reaper,
while both the bicycle and the automobile were heralded in primitive
prototypes. The gigantic expansion of the iron and steel industry was
foreshadowed in the change from wood to coal in the smelting furnaces.
The sewing-machine had brought with it, like the friction match, one of
the most profound influences in modifying domestic life, and making it
different from that of all preceding time.

Even in 1847 few of these things had lost their novelty, most of them
were in the earlier stages of development. But it is when we turn to
electricity that the rich virgin condition of an illimitable new kingdom
of discovery is seen. Perhaps the word "utilization" or "application" is
better than discovery, for then, as now, an endless wealth of phenomena
noted by experimenters from Gilbert to Franklin and Faraday awaited the
invention that could alone render them useful to mankind. The eighteenth
century, keenly curious and ceaselessly active in this fascinating field