PHYSICS MILLIKAN. 173 



after that Volta found that he could manufacture these same thun- 

 derbolts artificially by dipping dissimilar metals into an acid. And 

 30 years farther along Oersted found that those same thunderbolts 

 when tamed and running noiselessly along a wire would deflect a 

 magnet, and with that discovery the electric battery was born, and 

 the erstwhile blustering thunderbolts were set the inglorious task of 

 ringing house bells, primarily for the convenience of womankind. 

 Then 10 years later Faraday found that all he had to do to obtain 

 a current was to move a wire across the pole of a magnet, and in that 

 discovery the dynamo was born, and our modem electrical age, with 

 its electric transmission of power, its electric lighting, its electric 

 telephoning, electric toasting, electric foot warming, electric milk- 

 ing — all that is an immediate and inevitable consequence of that dis- 

 covery — a discovery which grew out of the faith of a few physicists 

 that the most mysterious, most capricious and the most terrible of 

 natural phenomena is capable of a rational explanation and ulti- 

 mately amenable to human control. 



In that statement I have revealed the taproot of the civilization 

 of the nineteenth century. Add to it a bit to cover the harnessing 

 of steam, and the development of the principle of the conservation 

 of energy, and you have an epitome of the progress of the century 

 just passed. It all grew out of the application of an extraordinarily 

 small number of discoveries as to the way in which nature works. 



And at the end of the nineteenth century there were many of us 

 plvysicists and engineers who thought that all the great discoveries 

 had been made. It was a common statement that this was so. I 

 heard it publicly made in 1894 ; and yet within a year of that time 

 I happened to be present in Berlin at the meeting of the physical 

 society at which Roentgen showed his first photographs, and since 

 that time we have had a whole new world, the very existence of which 

 was undreamed of before, opened up to our astonished eyes. We 

 have found a world of electrons which underlies the world of atoms 

 and molecules with which we had been familiar, and the discoveries 

 in that w T orld have poured in so rapidly within the last twenty years 

 that there are no two decades in human history that compare at all 

 with them in the rapidity of the advance. And these discoveries 

 have been made too for the most part by groups of men interested 

 merely in finding out how nature works. They have been made al- 

 most exclusively by college professors; and for 10 years they re- 

 mained the exclusive property of these professors. 



But what has happened in the last 10 years? The industrial 

 world has fallen over itself in the endeavor to get hold of these ad- 

 vances, and by their aid it has increased tenfold the power of the 

 telephone, it has obtained four or five times as much light as we got 

 a few years ago out of a given amount of electrical power it has de- 



