WHY PROGRESS IS BY LEAPS. 221 



the poucli for a stage of its journey, a carrier might come to the 

 end of his trip utterly fagged out; but if ho had barely the 

 strength to pass his burden to the next man it was enough. 

 Much the same is the system of relays when a telegram takes its 

 way from New York to Tacoma. First it goes to Buffalo, where 

 the current, faint after its run of four hundred and forty miles, 

 touches off a second powerful current born in Buffalo. This in 

 its turn bears the dispatch to Chicago. There a third current is 

 impressed into service, and so on, until at the end of a succession 

 of transfers the words are clicked out in Tacoma. This whole 

 process is committed to self-acting repeaters that do their work in 

 the fraction of a second. It is in pulling triggers in such fashion 

 as this, in liberating forces indefinitely greater than the initial 

 impulse, that electricity brings to muscles of brass and steel some- 

 thing very like a nervous system, so that the merest touch directs 

 the course of a steamship through the tempest-tossed Atlantic. 

 Engineer, workman, and artist can thus reserve their strength for 

 tasks more profitable than muscular dead lift and find their sweep 

 of initiation and control broadened to the utmost bound. In the 

 field of war, for instance, a torpedo can be launched, propelled, 

 steered, and exploded by a telegraph key a mile or two away ; the 

 constructor may, indeed, confidently give all his orders in advance 

 and build a torpedo which will fulfill a fate of both murder and 

 suicide predestined in its cams and magnets. Or a camera, under 

 the control of an operator at the safe end of a wire, is sent soar- 

 ing in a balloon car above an enemy's camp, effectively playing 

 the spy. 



Another apparatus electric and photographic, happily less un- 

 common, is employed for observatory records which, as near Are- 

 quipa, in Peru, without supervision keeps itself busy for a fort- 

 night together. Still more remarkable is Mr. Muybridge's round 

 of cameras, timed as only electricity can time them, which seize 

 practically instantaneous views of figures in rapid motion, as 

 horses trotting. In Mr. Edison's kinetoscope photographs made 

 at each forty-sixth of a second follow one another so quickly 

 under an eyepiece as to fuse with the effect of life and action. 

 Pictures of birds thus caught on the wing may prove seed corn 

 for harvests to be reaped by the experimenter in mechanical 

 flight — an achievement which, strange to say, attracts the interest 

 of military rather than business men. In the service of war and 

 peace one would suppose the ordinary telegraph to be speedy 

 enough. Not so, thinks the inventor. In the latest process a dis- 

 patch wings its way from New York to Chicago at the rate of 

 one thousand words a minute, to Philadelphia thrice as fast. The 

 telegram is taken first to a machine which symbolizes each letter 

 as perforations on a strip of paper ; then the strip is run between. 



