SCIENCE IN THE INDUSTRIAL WORLD 



the application of scientific ideas, makes up a volume 

 whose content should appeal to the most practical of 

 readers. 



For the most part the industries here represented 

 are essentially and characteristically modern. Book- 

 making is indeed an ancient art, and paints and dyes 

 of a crude type are manufactured even by barbarians. 

 But telegraph, cable, telephone, and phonograph are 

 affairs of the nineteenth century; photography is of 

 contemporary origin; and even the older industries 

 have undergone metamorphoses within the past gen- 

 eration that are all but revolutionary. 



Attention has been called more than once to the 

 extraordinary changes in the aspects of every-day 

 civilization that industrial developments in other fields 

 have wrought within the past half century; but no- 

 where else, perhaps, have there been changes so far- 

 reaching in their influence upon international relations 

 on the one hand and upon the details of the most mod- 

 est domestic economy on the other, as those which 

 have been effected through the application of electricity to 

 the transmission of verbal and oral messages. Telegraph 

 and telephone have wrought a virtual elimination of time 

 and space, and the economic importance of this revolu- 

 tion is past all calculation. In telling the story of the de- 

 velopment of these mechanisms and methods, therefore, 

 we are obviously concerned with some of the most 

 important of industrial problems; yet it is equally 

 obvious that we are still in close touch with sundry 

 departments of theoretical science but for which these 

 practical appliances would never have been invented. 



