Science and Industry 



humanity ; and every new facilitation of material 

 or spiritual contact between races and nations 

 increases this utility of science. 



But still more important than this expansive 

 power of science is the consideration of the 

 creative or adaptive work which consists in new 

 inventions. Any improvement in the economy of 

 inventive energy, the fecundation of ideas adapted 

 to human use, is of paramount significance in the 

 theory and the art of industrial progress. There 

 never was much truth in the stories which trace 

 great industrial inventions to suddenly miraculous 

 or casual discoveries. Almost all the serviceable 

 inventions of whose history we know anything 

 reliable grew up by slow accretions, the inventive 

 energy of many minds being directed along certain 

 channels of profitable inquiry and wrestling with 

 the same theoretic or technical difficulties, until at 

 length these are overcome. The number of known 

 instances where several men almost or quite simul- 

 taneously reach the goal attests the Tightness of 

 this general view. Even where some single mind, 

 a Kelvin, a Siemens, or an Edison makes a number 

 of considerable contributions to the technical arts, 

 the increment which affords success is generally 

 small compared with the common basis of accepted 

 knowledge, and a Marconi is only the first of several 

 close competitors to hit the mark. 



Those who have held that the twentieth century 

 was not likely to be so prolific in epoch-marking 

 inventions as the nineteenth, have no ground for 

 their conviction. On the contrary, it seems more 



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