FIFTY YEARS OF AMERICAN SCIENCE 9 



ward and honest as they are all) develops character, the bicy- 

 cle is the easy leader of other machines in shaping the mind 

 of its rider, and transforming itself and its rider into a single 

 thing. Better than other results is this : that the bicycle broke 

 the barrier of pernicious differentiation of the sexes and rent 

 the bonds of fashion, and daily impressed Spartan strength 

 and grace, and more than Spartan intelligence, on the mothers 

 of coming generations. So, weighed by its effect on body and 

 mind as well as on material progress, this device must be 

 classed as one of the world's great inventions. 



With the advance in simply applied mechanics, there 

 have been still greater advances in the knowledge of the 

 more obscure powers of nature, manifested in electricity 

 and magnetism, in sun and wind and storm, even in vitality 

 and mental action. Some of these have been made in Europe, 

 but more in America. Fifty years ago Morse and Henry 

 were doing the final work required to transform the electric 

 telegraph from a physical experiment to a commercial 

 agency, and soon nerves of steel and copper, throbbing with 

 intelligence, were following the pioneer into the remotest 

 recesses and pushing beneath the ocean ; Faraday, the Siemens 

 brothers, Helmholtz, and later Sir William Thomson (Lord 

 Kelvin) freely gave genius and toil; then came Edison with 

 an eruption of brilliant inventions ; and to-day time and space 

 are as if they were not, and from sea to sea our subjects of 

 thought are as one. It was but yesterday that half our world 

 knew not how the other half lived • now both halves read the 

 same items at breakfast. 



Themselves harvesters after the experimentalists in phys- 

 ics, the early telegraphers were planters for Graham Bell, 

 and the telephone came to carry the word of man afar, and 

 the graphophone to perpetuate it forever, and thus to com- 

 plete the annihilation of space and time as obstacles to the 

 diffusion and unification of intelligence. Inspired by success 

 in conveying thought, im^entors sought to conve}^ grosser 

 powers, and dynamos were invented to furnish light better 

 and cheaper than the world had known before; devices for 

 warming and even for cooking, and for lowering temperature 

 by fans and refrigerant pipes, quickly followed ; and now the 



