190 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 3 8 



To ponder on the future life of man and on the ability of science to 

 mold and reform the future is to lift oneself to a plane of high buoyance. 

 In the words of the Earl of Balfour, in an address he made as president 

 of the British Association, "The satisfaction it gives is almost esthetic 

 in its intensity and quality. We feel the same sort of pleasurable 

 shock as when, from the crest of some melancholy pass, we first see 

 far below us the sudden glory of plain, river and mountain." 



What woman or man but is interested in tomorrow? Judged by 

 the scientific marvels of the present day, what an age it will be! 



Photographs by radio; machines that seem to think; lights that 

 pierce fog; gas made from water; cameras recording lightning bolts 

 and taking pictures in the dark; 5-million-volt guns smashing atoms 

 to wrest new secrets from nature. 



News put into type by direct wire ; machines to administer anesthet- 

 ics, record telephone calls, and measure the billionth of an inch; other 

 machines to measure the smoothness of roads and record the nature of 

 accidents; ways to "hear" light and "see" sound. 



Fantastic? Yes, but they're here. 



These, and more, we have — although our elders would have scoffed 

 if they had been told that these things would come. But a plane 

 roaring from ocean to ocean between sunrise and sunset is nothing new. 

 People talk across the ocean every day by telephone. The time may 

 come when women will match fabrics by television, when their 

 kitchens will make present-day luxury seem like the drudgery our 

 grandmothers endured. 



It is impossible, however, to fathom truly what tomorrow may be 

 like. Only the rare human mind can free itself from the fetters of 

 today's accepted forms and think in new terms of a different age. 

 The first automobiles were cranked by hand. They broke many an 

 arm, but people accepted the fact because no mechanical way of 

 starting a car could ever work. Yet research, using a sleeve with 

 threads like a screw, found a way to crank the motor; it had never 

 dawned on science that it couldn't be done! 



The pace of the advance has quickened. The resources of science, 

 more closely knit, have speeded progress amazingly in the past 25 

 years. That pace will not slacken so long as human needs must be 

 met. If what has happened already seems incredible, what are we 

 likely to see in the not-distant future? 



For we know full well that tomorrow probably won't resemble this 

 age in the least. Too many "impossibilities" have come true in our 

 own life-span. We have not yet forgotten that "man will never fly"; 

 that conversing without wires was labeled an absurdity; that "nothing 

 can ever be done" about typhoid, tuberculosis, or malaria. 



Yet men have flown around the world, tallied by wireless across 

 the seas, stamped out plagues. The oxcart has made way for the 



