148 Master Minds of Modern Science 



based upon present developments, Professor Low foresees 

 a dramatic change in the methods both of attack and 

 defence. 



Only recently it was reported from Copenhagen that a 

 Norwegian inventor was bringing forward a defence scheme for 

 Denmark which will dispense with conscripts. The whole 

 defence would be electrical, chemical, and technical, and could 

 be controlled by a small staff of experts. That may be taken 

 as one of the first steps towards the scientific development of 

 attack and defence that must be expected in the future. 



Dr Low, however, has not confined his predictions 

 about the future to warfare. Before television had been 

 achieved he was forecasting the day when the business 

 man would be able, by wireless sight and sound, to trans- 

 act his business from his own home, without coming to 

 a city at all. 



He expects the factory of the remote future to be 

 worked by wireless power, transmitted without cables to 

 any part of the country. 



Even the problem of how to feed the expanding popula- 

 tions of the world may be solved in the same way, for 

 one of the scientific questions which Professor Low is now 

 investigating is the broadcasting of heat. Already he has 

 succeeded in melting a nail by heat broadcast from a spot 

 two feet away. Can that achievement be repeated over a 

 distance of thousands of miles ? If that can be achieved 

 — and, remembering wireless itself, who will say that it 

 cannot? — then perhaps it will be possible to warm the 

 polar regions, and to open up that vast territory for 

 farming and cultivation. 



It is a weird dream, but scarcely more strange to us 

 than an aeroplane would have seemed to Julius Caesar. 



Before many decades have passed the dream may have 

 been realized, and herds of cattle be grazing over lands 

 now the home of the polar bear and the blizzard. 



