232 Master Minds of Modern Science 



lectures indicate. Each year the Royal Society holds an 

 anniversary dinner, and Sir Ernest was one of the prin- 

 cipal speakers at the dinner of 1929. He said : 



I am sure that if we could look back a hundred years from 

 now we should see that this was the Golden Age of improvement 

 in matters of communication. ... If this is a time of great 

 development in practical science it has been inevitably followed 

 by great changes in the body politic. The motor-car, the flying- 

 machine, and wireless have probably had a greater effect on 

 the world than any previous discoveries. Of one thing I am 

 certain — that the banishment of distance — and we can com- 

 municate from one end of the world to the other in one-fifteenth 

 of a second — has inevitably brought the world together, and 

 we may be sure that the effect of that will be to bring the 

 whole peoples of the world into closer contact. 



The value of the earlier discoveries in radio-activity 

 has already been proved, and in radium and radium 

 emanation there has been secured a means of fighting 

 one of man's greatest scourges, cancer. The question now 

 is how far mankind will benefit by the breaking up of the 

 atom. If some means could be devised for releasing and 

 exploiting the internal energy of the atom, we should 

 have a source of power such as was never even dreamed 

 of before. While Sir Ernest himself has never made 

 any prophecy as to the likelihood of man's being able to 

 break up the atom and employ atomic energy, this is a 

 favourite subject for writers of scientific fiction. 



Some years ago Mr Wells in his World Set Free gave a 

 most interesting forecast of the progress of invention 

 during the next half-century. He tells how in 1933 gold 

 was produced from bismuth. " In this year was solved 

 the problem of inducing radio-activity in the heavier 

 metals and so tapping the internal energy of atoms.' His 

 hero, Holsten, 



set up atomic disintegration in minute particles of bismuth, 



