26 SCIENCE REMAKING THE WORLD 



we should recall that the swift motor boats that guarded 

 the coasts were also run by gasolene. 



Nor can I stop to discuss what the new art of aviation 

 meant in the war. Leonardo da Vinci designed a fly- 

 ing machine but it had to wait for five hundred years 

 for a motor light and strong enough to carry it through 

 the air. But aviation as yet plays little part in our 

 everyday lives so let us turn to the automobile, whose 

 influence we can observe for and on ourselves. 



In 1896 there were only four gasolene cars in the 

 United States. To-day there are 10,000,000. Of these 

 four pioneer automobiles, one was built by Elwood 

 Haynes of Kokomo, Indiana, one by Henry Ford of 

 Detroit, one by C. E. Duryea of Pennsylvania, and one 

 by Benz of Germany. 



These early cars were called "horseless carriages" 

 and that is what they looked like, as though the horses 

 had been unhitched and the buggy left to run down hill 

 alone. Many inventions come in this negative way; 

 wireless telephones, fireless cookers, smokeless powder 

 and the like. Something left out makes something new. 

 This seems to be also nature's way, for biologists tell us 

 that valuable mutations in plants and animals often 

 arise from the omission of some single chromosome that 

 has accidentally got lost in the shuffle. 



Gradually, however, the motor car ceased to look like 

 a mere mutilated vehicle and assumed a form and sym- 

 metry of its own. The horse, who had most reason to 

 view with alarm the advent of his fiery rival, soon 

 became oblivious to it. The machine, at first re- 

 fused admittance to the highways, came in the course, 



