VI 



The Vision of a Blind Man 



With his sightless eyes 

 he looked into the future 



He saw the social and industrial 

 revolution that science could bring 

 about, once people understood its 

 laws, and how these laws could be 

 made to work for them. 



There wasn't any popular demand 

 for science in those days; it was 

 considered something absolutely 

 apart from the daily life of people. 



Youmans, a practical man who 

 made his dreams come true, had to 

 make people realize a need of 

 which they were unconscious, and 

 then supply that need. 



He invented just one device- — 

 the chart or diagram object lesson, 

 in universal use today and as ef- 

 fective as it was when the ^'graphic" 

 brought Youmans into national 

 prominence. 



A color chemical chart 

 invented by a blind man 



Tens of thousands learned the 

 rudiments of chemistry by looking 

 at a color chart devised by a blind 

 man. This revealed, almost at a 

 glance, the whole mechanism of 



chemical combinations, as it was 

 then conceived. 



Youmans supplemented this with 

 a text book on chemistry and 

 150,000 copies were sold. 



A friendship and business rela- 

 tion that lasted forty years was 

 begun when the blind man was led 

 into the store of D. Appleton & 

 Co., then on Broadway below the 

 City Hall, to borrow from a book- 

 seller a volume he could not afford 

 to buy and which he could not find 

 in the libraries. Youmans' advice 

 made Appleton's the leading pub- 

 lishers of scientific books in Amer- 

 ica. The editing of scientific books, 

 his own writings, his success on 

 the platform — Youmans was a 

 popular lecturer for seventeen years 

 — did not educate people fast enough 

 to satisfy this man of action. 



He could make science under- 

 standable but he could not reach 

 people in suflficient numbers. He 

 wanted to sell science to the whole 

 people. 



He knew that what was needed 

 was a magazine. It is the medium 

 that can give national publicity. 

 It has the power of iteration; its 

 value depends upon its success in 

 supplying a human need. 



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