NEW CONCEPTIONS IN SCIENCE 



noted that Marconi, like Morse, was an untrained 

 amateur. It was a free field; it was late before 

 an American entered. Even with all the stimu- 

 lating examples of Edison, Tesla, Elihu Thompson, 

 Marconi had practically bridged the Atlantic be- 

 fore an American system was heard of. 



Another instance. We have become the first 

 steel -makers on earth. Every school-boy knows 

 the importance of the slightest admixtures in this 

 industry that one per cent, of carbon means one 

 kind of steel; two per cent., another; four per cent., 

 something wholly different. Within a few years 

 the fantastic "art" of metallurgy has been trans- 

 formed from a collection of housewives' receipts to 

 a science. To-day we may make a gold that will 

 melt in a candle-flame, another that will cut glass. 

 A mixture of metals, like lead, tin, and bismuth, 

 which melt, separately, at three hundred to five 

 hundred degrees, dissolves in boiling water. A 

 scant trace of one substance introduced in another 

 gives the latter unheard-of qualities. Two metals 

 like gold and iron, simply placed in contact, slowly 

 interpenetrate and mix with each other as if they 

 were so much water and wine. An up-to-date, 

 matter-of-fact text - book of the science reads like 

 the prescriptions of the old alchemists. Our ideas 

 of the solid world about us have been irradiated 

 with a new light. 



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