July 1, 1921] 



SCIENCE 



thought, the mode of attack upon physical 

 problems which has made this industrial age 

 what it is, and therein lies the tremendous sig- 

 nificance of a discovery of the kind which we 

 are honoring to-night. 



We are so close to this age in which we 

 live that we do not see what it means; we do 

 not see it in its relation to other centuries. 

 And therefore I should like to take you up in 

 an Einstein airplane that violates all the re- 

 lations of space and time so that you may see 

 with me a few spots in geography and in time. 

 Suppose we sail first, in the present, to the 

 banks of the Tigris or Euphrates and see a 

 picture which Professor Breasted drew to 

 my attention when he came back from a recent 

 mission to the near east. He pictured the in- 

 habitants of that region tilling the ground 

 with a crooked stick, bringing their hard- 

 earned produce to the shores of the river, put- 

 ting it on crude rafts which were made from 

 the skins of goats and sheep, and paddling it 

 laboriously across to the other side. Then he 

 threw on the screen a photograph of an an- 

 cient Babylonian tablet which showed the in- 

 habitants of that region four thousand years 

 ago doing exactly the same thing in exactly 

 the same way. Eour thousand years without 

 a bit of progress — each generation simply fol- 

 lowing the last in living a miserable existence, 

 reproducing its kind and then passing on. 

 Leave that! It is a discouraging picture. 



Fly over into India and see this! I heard 

 last winter Mr. Sam Higinbotham describe 

 the conditions prevailing in that land now, 

 where, as he said, millions of men go out into 

 the fields in the morning with only a handful 

 of grain — all they have to eat for the day; 

 work a long day in perpetual hunger and feel 

 that they would be perfectly happy if they 

 could get all they wanted of such raw grain 

 to eat. What wonder that Heaven for these 

 men is Nirvana — the escape from existence! 



Now fly over China. To do so, you have 

 only to look at the sign in front of this mu- 

 seum : " Millions starving to death in China 

 unless they can get help from this western 

 world ! " Discouraging pictures ! What is 

 wrong with the world? Fly back to this 



country and perhaps the following sights may 

 suggest an answer. Circle above the Missis- 

 sippi near New Orleans, and contrast what 

 you see with the picture on the banks of the 

 Tigris. See a train on the Southern Pacific 

 Road bearing five hundred tons of produce 

 from Texas, pulled upon a great ferry with- 

 out even uncoupling the engine. See it in 

 fifteen minutes on the other side ready to dis- 

 tribute its huge load of food stuils raised with 

 the aid of automatic planters, tractor-plows 

 and steam threshers on the broad plains of the 

 west, to the millions of inhabitants in the 

 eastern half of our country. Or, again, fly 

 over the biggest copper mine in the world 

 which is near Salt Lake City and look at a 

 mountain of two per cent, copper being shov- 

 eled away by great steam shovels with com- 

 paratively little human labor. See forty 

 thousand tons a day of ore pulled in huge 

 hundred-ton cars a few miles to the mill. Then 

 see one of those huge cars elevated, wheels 

 and all with no apparent human assistance, 

 sixty feet high, turned slowly over and made 

 to dump its load of ore into the mighty mill 

 where a great, senseless, iron Cyclops grinds 

 it into powder. Then watch the unseen nat- 

 ural forces of cohesion and adhesion in the 

 flotation process pick out the ore from the 

 gangue, without human aid, though controlled 

 by human brains, and thus produce from 

 sources altogether unusable fifteen years ago, 

 the cheapest copper which the world has ever 

 seen, the copper with which you are now 

 harnessing new water power and building new 

 electric railroads across the continent, with 

 which famine is made an impossibility in any 

 part of these United States. 



Now, what is the most essential and most 

 significant element of difference betweeen the 

 two pictures which you have seen, the one here, 

 the other half way around the earth? In this 

 country, where the giant forces of nature have 

 been set at work, the cheapest paid laborer 

 on a building or in a steel plant, or on a 

 farm, got before the war for eight or nine 

 hours of labor, and he gets now, more than 

 twenty times as much, not merely in money 

 but in actual goods to be purchased with his 



