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Anticipations Chapter 1 Part 1 · The H. G. Wells Library

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Speaker 1: Chapter one, a of Anticipations. This is a LibriVox recording.
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Speaker 1: All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
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Speaker 1: information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Anticipations
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Speaker 1: by H. G. Wells, Chapter one A locomotion in the
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Speaker 1: twentieth century. It is proposed in this book to present,
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Speaker 1: in as oddly an arrangement as the necessarily diffused nature
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Speaker 1: of the subject admits, certain speculations about the trend of
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Speaker 1: present forces, speculations which, taken altogether, will build up an
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Speaker 1: imperfect and very hypothetical, but sincerely intended forecast of the
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Speaker 1: way things will probably go in this new century. Footnote.
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Speaker 1: In the earlier papers of which this is the first,
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Speaker 1: attention will be given to the probable development of the
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Speaker 1: civilized community in general. Afterwards, these generalizations will be modified
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Speaker 1: in accordance with certain broad differences of race, custom, and religion.
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Speaker 1: End footnote. Necessarily diffidence will be one of the graces
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Speaker 1: of the performance. Hitherto, such forecasts have been presented almost
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Speaker 1: invariably in the form of fiction, and commonly the provocation
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Speaker 1: of the satirical opportunity has been too much for the writer.
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Speaker 1: Footnote of quite serious forecasts and inductions of things to come.
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Speaker 1: The number is very small, indeed, a suggestion or so
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Speaker 1: of mister Herbert Spencer's Mister Kydd's social evolution, some hints
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Speaker 1: from mister archdall Reid, some political forecasts German for the
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Speaker 1: most part, Hartmann's Earth in the twentieth century, for example,
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Speaker 1: some incidental forecasts by Professor Langley, Century Magazine, December eighteen
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Speaker 1: eighty four, for example. And such isolated computations as Professor
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Speaker 1: Crooks's wheat warning and the various estimates of our coal
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Speaker 1: supply make almost a complete bibliography of fiction. Of course,
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Speaker 1: there is abundance stories of the year two thousand and
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Speaker 1: Battles of Dorking and the like. I learned from mister Peddy,
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Speaker 1: the bibliographer, over one hundred pamphlets and books of that description.
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Speaker 1: But from its very nature, and I am writing with
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Speaker 1: the intimacy of one who has tried, fiction can never
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Speaker 1: be satisfactory in this application. Fiction is necessarily concrete and definite.
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Speaker 1: It permits of no open alternatives. Its aim of illusion
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Speaker 1: prevents a proper amplitude of demonstration, and modern prophecy should
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Speaker 1: be one submits a branch of speculation and should follow
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Speaker 1: with all decorum the scientific method. The very form of
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Speaker 1: fiction carries with it something of disavowal. Indeed, very much
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Speaker 1: of the fiction of the future pretty frankly abandons the
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Speaker 1: prophetic altogether, and becomes polemical, cautionary, or idealistic, and a
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Speaker 1: mere footnote and commentary to our present discontents. End footnote.
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Speaker 1: Narrative form becomes more and more of a nuisance as
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Speaker 1: the speculative inductions becomes sincere, and here it will be
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Speaker 1: abandoned altogether in favor of a texture of frank inquiries
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Speaker 1: and arranged considerations. Our utmost aim is a rough sketch
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Speaker 1: of the coming time, a prospectus, as it were, of
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Speaker 1: the joint undertaking of mankind in facing these impending years.
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Speaker 1: The reader is a prospective shareholder he and his heirs,
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Speaker 1: though whether he will find this anticipatory balance sheet to
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Speaker 1: his belief or liking is another matter, for reasons that
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Speaker 1: will develop themselves more clearly as these papers unfold. It
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Speaker 1: is extremely convenient to begin with a speculation upon the
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Speaker 1: probable development and changes of the means of land locomotion
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Speaker 1: during the coming decades. No one who has studied the
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Speaker 1: civil history of the nineteenth century will deny how far
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Speaker 1: reaching the consequences of changes in transit may be. And
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Speaker 1: no one who has studied the military performances of General
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Speaker 1: Buller and General Duet but will see that upon transper
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Speaker 1: upon locomotion may also hang the most momentous issues of
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Speaker 1: politics and war. The growth of our great cities, the
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Speaker 1: rapid populating of America, the entry of China into the
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Speaker 1: field of European politics, are for example, quite obviously and
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Speaker 1: directly consequences of new methods of locomotion. And while so
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Speaker 1: much hangs upon the development of these methods, that development is,
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Speaker 1: on the other hand, a process comparatively independent now at
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Speaker 1: any rate, of most of the other great movements affected
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Speaker 1: by it. It depends upon a sequence of ideas arising,
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Speaker 1: and of experiments made, and upon laws of political economy
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Speaker 1: almost as inevitable as natural laws. Such great issues, supposing
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Speaker 1: them to be possible, as the return of Western Europe
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Speaker 1: to the Roman Communion, the overthrow of the British Empire
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Speaker 1: by Germany, or the inundation of Europe by the Yellow Peril,
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Speaker 1: might conceivably affect such details, let us say, as door
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Speaker 1: handles and ventilators, or mileage of life, but would probably
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Speaker 1: leave the essential features of the evolution of locomotion untouched.
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Speaker 1: The evolution of locomotion has a purely historical relation to
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Speaker 1: the Western European peoples. It is no longer dependent upon them,
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Speaker 1: or exclusively in their hands. The Malay nowadays sets out
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Speaker 1: upon his pilgrimage to Mecca in an excursion steamship of iron,
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Speaker 1: and the immemorial Hindu goes a shopping in a train.
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Speaker 1: And in Japan and Australasia and America there are plentiful
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Speaker 1: hands and minds to take up the process now, even
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Speaker 1: should the European let it fall. The beginning of this
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Speaker 1: twentieth century happens to coincide with a very interesting phase
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Speaker 1: in that great development of means of land transit that
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Speaker 1: has been the distinctive feature, speaking materially of the nineteenth century.
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Speaker 1: The nineteenth century, when it takes its place with the
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Speaker 1: other centuries in the chronological charts of the future, will,
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Speaker 1: if it needs a symbol, almost inevitably have as that
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Speaker 1: symbol a steam engine running upon a railway. This period
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Speaker 1: covers the first experiments, the first great developments, and the
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Speaker 1: complete elaboration of that mode of transit, and the determination
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Speaker 1: of nearly all the broad features of the century's history
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Speaker 1: may be traced directly or indirectly to that process. And
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Speaker 1: since an interesting light is thrown upon the new phases
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Speaker 1: and land locomotion that are now beginning, it will be
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Speaker 1: well to begin this forecast with a retrospect and to
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Speaker 1: revise very shortly the history of the addition of steam
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Speaker 1: travel to the resources of mankind. A curious and profitable
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Speaker 1: question arises at once, How is it that the steam
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Speaker 1: locomotion appeared at the time it did, and not earlier
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Speaker 1: in the history of the world because it was not invented?
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Speaker 1: But why was it not invented? Not for want of
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Speaker 1: a crowning intellect, For none of the many minds concerned
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Speaker 1: in the development strikes one as the mind of Newton, Shakespeare,
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Speaker 1: or Darwin strikes one as being that of an unprecedented man.
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Speaker 1: It is not that the need for the railway and
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Speaker 1: steaming engine had only just arisen. And, to use one
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Speaker 1: of the most egregiously wrong and misleading phrases that ever
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Speaker 1: dropped from the lips of man, the demand created the supply.
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Speaker 1: It was quite the other way about. There was really
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Speaker 1: no urgent demand for such things at the time, the
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Speaker 1: current needs of the European world seemed to have been
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Speaker 1: fairly well served by coach and diligence in eighteen hundred,
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Speaker 1: and on the other hand, every administrator of intelligence in
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Speaker 1: the Roman and Chinese empires must have felt an urgent
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Speaker 1: need for more rapid methods of transport than those at
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Speaker 1: his disposal. Nor was the development of the steam locomotive
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Speaker 1: the result of any sudden discovery of steam. Steam, and
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Speaker 1: something of the mechanical possibilities of steam, had been known
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Speaker 1: for two thousand years. It had been used for pumping water,
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Speaker 1: opening doors, and working toys before the Christian era. It
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Speaker 1: may be urged that this advance was the outcome of
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Speaker 1: that new and more systematic handling of knowledge initiated by
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Speaker 1: Lord Bacon and sustained by the Royal society, but this
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Speaker 1: does not appear to have been the case, though no
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Speaker 1: doubt the new habits of mind had spread outward from
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Speaker 1: that center played their part. The men whose names a
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Speaker 1: cardinal in the history of this development invented for the
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Speaker 1: most part in a quite empirical way, and Trevithi's engine
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Speaker 1: was running along its rails, and evans boat was walloping
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Speaker 1: up the Hudson a quarter of a century before Carnot
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Speaker 1: expounded his general proposition. There were no such deductions from
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Speaker 1: principles to application as occur in the story of electricity
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Speaker 1: to justify our attribution of the steam engine to the
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Speaker 1: scientific impulse. Nor does this particular invention seem to have
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Speaker 1: been directly due to the new possibilities of reducing, shaping
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Speaker 1: and casting iron afforded by the substitution of coal for
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Speaker 1: wood and iron works through the greater temperature afforded by
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Speaker 1: a coal fire. In China, coal has been used in
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Speaker 1: the reduction of iron for many centuries. No doubt, these
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Speaker 1: new facilities did greatly help the steam engine in its
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Speaker 1: invasion of the field of common life, but quite certainly
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Speaker 1: they were not sufficient to see set it going. It
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Speaker 1: was indeed not one cause, but a very complex and
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Speaker 1: unprecedented series of causes that set the steam locomotive going.
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Speaker 1: It was indirectly and in another way, that the introduction
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Speaker 1: of coal became the decisive factor. One peculiar condition of
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Speaker 1: its production in England seemed to have supplied just one
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Speaker 1: ingredient that had been missing for two thousand years in
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Speaker 1: the groups of conditions that were necessary before the steam
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Speaker 1: locomotive could appear. This missing ingredient was a demand for
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Speaker 1: some comparatively simple, profitable machine upon which the elementary principles
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Speaker 1: of steam utilization could be worked out. If one studies
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Speaker 1: Stephenson's rocket in detail, as one realizes its profound complexity,
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Speaker 1: one begins to understand how impossible it would have been
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Speaker 1: for that structure to have come into existence de novo. However,
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Speaker 1: urgently the world had need of it. But it happened
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Speaker 1: that the coal needed to replace the dwindling forests of
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Speaker 1: this small and exceptionally rain saturated country occurs in low,
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Speaker 1: hollow basins over laying clay, and not as in China
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Speaker 1: and the Alleghanies, for example, on high lying outcrops that
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Speaker 1: can be worked as chalk is worked in England. From
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Speaker 1: this fact, it followed that some quite unprecedented pumping appliances
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Speaker 1: became necessary, and the thoughts of practical men were turned
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Speaker 1: thereby to the long neglected possibilities of steam. Wind was
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Speaker 1: extremely inconvenient for the purpose of pumping, because in these
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Speaker 1: latitudes it is inconsistent. It was costly too, because at
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Speaker 1: any time the laborers might be obliged to sit at
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Speaker 1: the pit'smouth for weeks together, whistling for a gale, or
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Speaker 1: waiting for the water to be got under again. But
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Speaker 1: steam had already been used for pumping upon one or
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Speaker 1: two estates in England, rather as a toy than in
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Speaker 1: earnest before the middle of the seventeenth century, and the
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Speaker 1: attempt to employ it was so obvious as to be
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Speaker 1: practically unavoidable footnote. It might have been used in the
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Speaker 1: same way in Italy in the first century, had not
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Speaker 1: the grandiose taste for aqueducts prevailed end footnote. The water
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Speaker 1: trickling into the hole measures footnote, and also into the
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Speaker 1: cornwall mines, be it noted end footnote. Acted therefore like
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Speaker 1: water trickling upon chemicals that have long been mixed together,
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Speaker 1: dry and inert. Immediately the latent reactions were set going
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Speaker 1: savory newcomen A host of other workers, culminating in what working,
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Speaker 1: always by steps that were at least so nearly obvious
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Speaker 1: as to give rise again and again to simultaneous discoveries,
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Speaker 1: changed this toy of steam into a real a commercial thing.
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Speaker 1: Developed a trade in pumping engines, created foundries, and a
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Speaker 1: new art of engineering, and almost unconscious of what they
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Speaker 1: were doing, made the steam locomotive a well nigh unavoidable consequence.
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Speaker 1: At last, after a century of improvement on pumping engines,
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Speaker 1: there remained nothing but the very obvious stage of getting
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Speaker 1: the engine that had been developed on wheels and out
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Speaker 1: upon the ways of the world. Ever and again, during
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Speaker 1: the eighteenth century an engine would be put upon the
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Speaker 1: roads and pronounced a failure. A monstrous, paleopheric creature was
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Speaker 1: visible on a French high road as early as seventeen
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Speaker 1: sixty nine, but by the dawn of the nineteenth century
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Speaker 1: the problem had very nearly got itself solved. By eighteen
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Speaker 1: o four, Trivetic had a steam locomotive indisputably in motion
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Speaker 1: and almost financially possible, and from his hands it puffed
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Speaker 1: its way slowly at first, and then under Stevenson, faster
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Speaker 1: and faster, to a transitory empire over the earth. It
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Speaker 1: was a steam locomotive, but for all that it was
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Speaker 1: primarily a steam engine for pumping adapted to a new end.
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Speaker 1: It was a steam engine whose ancestral stage had developed
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Speaker 1: under conditions that were by no means exacting in the
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Speaker 1: matter of weight, and from that fact followed a consequence
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Speaker 1: that has hampered railway travel and transport very greatly, and
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Speaker 1: that is tolerated nowadays only through a belief in its
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Speaker 1: practical necessity. The steam locomotive was all too huge and
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Speaker 1: heavy for the high road. It had to be put
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Speaker 1: upon rails, and so clearly linked our steam engines in
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Speaker 1: railways in our minds that in common language now the
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Speaker 1: latter implies the former. But indeed it is the result
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Speaker 1: of accidental impediments of avoidable difficulties that we travel today
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Speaker 1: on rails. Railway traveling is at best a compromise. The
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Speaker 1: quite conceivable ideal of locomotive conveyance, as far as travelers
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Speaker 1: are concerned, is surely a highly mobile conveyance, capable of
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Speaker 1: traveling easily and swiftly to any desired point, traversing at
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Speaker 1: a reasonably controlled pace the ordinary roads and streets, and
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Speaker 1: having access for higher rates of speed and long distance
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Speaker 1: traveling to specialized ways restricted to swift traffic, and possibly
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Speaker 1: furnished with guide rails for the collection and delivery of
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Speaker 1: all sorts of perishable goods. Also, the same system is
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Speaker 1: obviously altogether superior to the existing methods. Moreover, such a
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Speaker 1: system would admit of that secular progress in engines and
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Speaker 1: vehicles that the stereotyped conditions of the railway have almost
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Speaker 1: completely arrested, because it would allow almost any new pattern
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Speaker 1: to be put at once upon the ways without interference
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Speaker 1: with the established traffic. Had such an ideal been kept
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Speaker 1: in view from the first, the traveler would now be
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Speaker 1: able to get through his long distance journeys at a
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Speaker 1: pace of from seventy miles or more an hour, without
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Speaker 1: changing and without any of the trouble, waiting, expense and
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Speaker 1: delay that arises between the household or hotel and the
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Speaker 1: actual rail It was an ideal that must have been
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Speaker 1: at least possible to an intelligent person fifty years ago,
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Speaker 1: and had it been resolutely pursued, the world, instead of
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Speaker 1: fumbling from compromise to compromise, as it always has done
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Speaker 1: and as it will do very probably for many centuries, yet,
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Speaker 1: might have been provided today not only with an infinitely
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Speaker 1: more practicable method of communication, but with one capable of
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Speaker 1: a steady and continual evolution from year to year. But
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Speaker 1: there was a more obvious path of development, and one
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Speaker 1: immediately cheaper, and along that path went short sighted nineteenth
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Speaker 1: century progress quite heag less of the possibility of ending
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Speaker 1: in a cul de sac. The first locomotives, apart from
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Speaker 1: the heavy tradition of their ancestry, were like all experimental machinery,
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Speaker 1: needlessly clumsy and heavy, and their inventors, being men of
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Speaker 1: insufficient faith, instead of working for lightness and smoothness of motion,
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Speaker 1: took the easier course of placing them upon the tramways
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Speaker 1: that were already in existence, chiefly for the transit of
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Speaker 1: heavy goods over soft roads. And from that followed a
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Speaker 1: very interesting and curious result. These tram lines very naturally
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Speaker 1: had exactly the width of an ordinary cart, a width
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Speaker 1: prescribed by the strength of one horse. Few people saw
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Speaker 1: in the locomotive anything but a cheap substitute for horseflesh,
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Speaker 1: or found anything incongruous in letting the dimensions of a
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Speaker 1: horse determine the dimensions of an engine. It mattered nothing
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Speaker 1: that from the first the passenger was ridiculously cramped, hampered,
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Speaker 1: and crowded in the carriage. He had always been cramped
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Speaker 1: in a coach, and it would have seemed utopian, a
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Speaker 1: very dreadful thing, indeed, to our grandparents to propose traveling
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Speaker 1: without cramping by mere inertia. The horse cart gage, the
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Speaker 1: four foot eight and a half inch gage namine contra
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Speaker 1: descente established itself in the world, and now everywhere the
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Speaker 1: train is dwarfed to a scale that limits arelike its comfort,
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Speaker 1: power and speed. Before every engine, as it were, trots.
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Speaker 1: The ghost of a superseded horse refuses most resolutely to
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Speaker 1: trot faster than fifty miles an hour, and shies and
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Speaker 1: threatens catastrophe at every point and curve that fifty miles
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Speaker 1: an hour, most authorities are agreed, is the limit of
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Speaker 1: our speed for land travel, so far as existing conditions go. Footnote,
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Speaker 1: it might be worse if the biggest horses had been
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Speaker 1: Shetland ponies. We should be traveling now in railway carriages
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Speaker 1: to hold two each side at a maximum speed of
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Speaker 1: perhaps twenty miles an hour. There is hardly any reason,
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Speaker 1: beyond this tradition of the horse, why the railway carriage
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Speaker 1: should not be even nine or ten feet wide. The wood,
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Speaker 1: that is, of the smallest room in which people can
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Speaker 1: live in comfort, hung on such springs and wheels as
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Speaker 1: would effectually destroy all vibration, and furnished with all the
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Speaker 1: equipment of comfortable chambers end footnote. Only a revolutionary reconstruction
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Speaker 1: of the railways, or the development of some new competing
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Speaker 1: method of land travel can carry us beyond that. People
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Speaker 1: of today take the railways for granted as they take
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Speaker 1: sea and sky. They were born in a railway world,
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Speaker 1: and they expect to die in one. But if only
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Speaker 1: they will strip from their eyes the most blinding of
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Speaker 1: all influences, acquiescence in the familiar, they will see clearly
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Speaker 1: enough that this vast and elaborate railway system of ours,
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Speaker 1: by which the whole world is linked together, is really
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Speaker 1: only a vast system of trains of horse wagons and
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Speaker 1: coaches drawn along rails by pumping engines upon wheels. Is that,
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Speaker 1: in spite of its present vast extension, likely to remain
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Speaker 1: the predominant method of land locomotion, even for so short
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Speaker 1: a period as the next hundred years. Now, so much
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Speaker 1: capital is represented by the existing type of railways, and
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Speaker 1: they have so firm an establishment in the acquiescence of men,
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Speaker 1: that it is very doubtful if the railways will ever
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Speaker 1: attempt any very fundamental change in the direction of greater
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Speaker 1: speed or facility, unless they are first exposed to the
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Speaker 1: pressure of our second alternative competition, and we may very
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Speaker 1: well go on to inquire how long will it be
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Speaker 1: before that second alternative comes into operation, if ever it
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Speaker 1: is to do so. Let us consider what other possibilities
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Speaker 1: seem to offer themselves. Let us revert to the ideal
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Speaker 1: we have already laid down, and consider what hopes and
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Speaker 1: obstacles to its attainment there seem to be. The abounding
18:44
Speaker 1: presence of numerous experimental motives to day is so stimulating
18:48
Speaker 1: to the imagination. There are so many stimulated persons at
18:52
Speaker 1: work upon them that it is difficult to believe the
18:55
Speaker 1: obvious impossibility of most of them. Their convulsiveness, clumsiness, and
18:59
Speaker 1: in many cases exasperating trail of stench, will not be
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Speaker 1: rapidly fined away. Footnote. Explosives as a motive power were
19:08
Speaker 1: first attempted by Huygens and one or two others in
19:11
Speaker 1: the seventeenth century, and just as with the turbine type
19:15
Speaker 1: of apparatus, it was probably the impetus given to the
19:18
Speaker 1: development of steam by the convenient colocation of coal and
19:22
Speaker 1: water and the need for an engine, that arrested the
19:25
Speaker 1: advance of this parallel inquiry until our own time. Explosive
19:29
Speaker 1: engines in which gas and petroleum are employed are now abundant.
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Speaker 1: But for all that we can regard the explosive engine
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Speaker 1: as still in its experimental stages. So far research and
19:39
Speaker 1: explosives has been directed chiefly to the possibilities of higher
19:43
Speaker 1: and still higher explosives for use in war, the neglect
19:47
Speaker 1: of the mechanical application of this class of substance being
19:50
Speaker 1: largely due to the fact that chemists are not, as
19:53
Speaker 1: a rule engineers, nor engineers chemists, but an easily portable substance,
19:59
Speaker 1: the deco composition of which would evolve energy, or what is,
20:03
Speaker 1: from the practical point of view, much the same thing.
20:06
Speaker 1: An easily portable substance which could be decomposed electrically by
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Speaker 1: wind or water power, and which would then recombine and
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Speaker 1: supply force, either in intermittent thrusts at a piston or
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Speaker 1: as an electric current, would be infinitely more convenient for
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Speaker 1: all locomotive purposes than the cumbersome bunkers and boilers required
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Speaker 1: by steam. The presumption is altogether in favor of the
20:29
Speaker 1: possibility of such substances. Their advent will be the beginning
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Speaker 1: of the end for steam traction on land, and of
20:35
Speaker 1: the steam ship at sea the end indeed of the
20:38
Speaker 1: age of coal and steam, and even with regard to steam,
20:42
Speaker 1: there may be a curious change of method. Before the end.
20:45
Speaker 1: It is beginning to appear that, after all, the piston
20:49
Speaker 1: and cylinder type of engine is for locomotive purposes on
20:53
Speaker 1: water at least, if not on land. By no means
20:56
Speaker 1: the most perfect another and fundamentally different type, the turbine type,
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Speaker 1: in which the impulse of the steam spins a wheel
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Speaker 1: instead of shoving a piston, would appear to be altogether
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Speaker 1: better than the adapted pumping engine at any rate for
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Speaker 1: the purposes of steam navigation. Hero of Alexandria describes an
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Speaker 1: elementary form of such an engine, and the early experimenters
21:19
Speaker 1: of the seventeenth century tried and abandoned the rotary principle.
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Speaker 1: It was not adapted to pumping, and pumping was the
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Speaker 1: only application that then offered sufficient immediate encouragement to persistence.
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Speaker 1: The thing marked time for quite two centuries and a half. Therefore,
21:34
Speaker 1: while the piston engines perfected themselves, and only in the
21:38
Speaker 1: eighties did the requirements of the dynamo electric machine open
21:42
Speaker 1: a practicable way of advance. The motors of the dynamo
21:45
Speaker 1: electric machine in the nineteenth century, in fact, played exactly
21:49
Speaker 1: the role of the pumping engine in the eighteenth and
21:52
Speaker 1: by eighteen ninety four, so many difficulties of detail had
21:55
Speaker 1: been settled that a syndicate of capitalists and scientific men
21:59
Speaker 1: could face the construction of an experimental ship. This ship,
22:04
Speaker 1: the Turbinea, after a considerable amount of trial and modification,
22:08
Speaker 1: attained the unprecedented speed of thirty four and a half
22:12
Speaker 1: knots an hour, and His Majesty's Navy has possessed in
22:15
Speaker 1: the Turbinia's younger and greater sister, the Viper, now unhappily lost,
22:21
Speaker 1: a torpedo destroyer capable of forty one miles an hour.
22:25
Speaker 1: There can be little doubt that the sea speeds of
22:27
Speaker 1: fifty and even sixty miles an hour will be attained
22:30
Speaker 1: within the next few years. But I do not think
22:33
Speaker 1: that these developments will do more than delay the advent
22:36
Speaker 1: of the explosive or storage of force engine end footnote.
22:42
Speaker 1: I do not think that it is asking too much
22:44
Speaker 1: of the reader's faith and progress to assume that so
22:47
Speaker 1: far as a light powerful engine goes comparatively noiseless smooth
22:51
Speaker 1: running not obnoxious to sensitive nostrils and altogether suitable for
22:55
Speaker 1: high road traffic. The problem will very speedily be solved.
23:00
Speaker 1: And upon that assumption, in what direction are these new
23:02
Speaker 1: motor vehicles likely to develop, How will they react upon
23:06
Speaker 1: the railways, and where finally will they take us? At
23:10
Speaker 1: present they seem to promise developments upon three distinct and
23:13
Speaker 1: definite lines. There will, first of all be the motor
23:17
Speaker 1: truck for heavy traffic. Already such trucks are in evidence
23:20
Speaker 1: distributing goods and parcels of various sorts, and sooner or later,
23:25
Speaker 1: no doubt the numerous advantages of such an arrangement will
23:28
Speaker 1: lead to the organization of large carrier companies using such
23:31
Speaker 1: motor trucks to carry goods in bulk or parcels on
23:34
Speaker 1: the high roads. Such companies will be in an exceptionally
23:38
Speaker 1: favorable position to organize storage and repair for the motors
23:42
Speaker 1: of the general public unprofitable terms, and possibly to cooperate
23:46
Speaker 1: in various ways with the manufacturers of special types of
23:50
Speaker 1: motor machines. In the next place, and parallel to the
23:54
Speaker 1: motor truck, they will develop the hired or privately owned
23:57
Speaker 1: motor carriage. This for all except the longest journeys will
24:00
Speaker 1: add a fine sense of personal independence to all the
24:03
Speaker 1: small conveniences of first class railway travel. It will be
24:07
Speaker 1: capable of a day's journey of three hundred miles or more,
24:11
Speaker 1: long before the developments to be presently foreshadowed arrive. One
24:15
Speaker 1: will change nothing unless it is the driver. From stage
24:18
Speaker 1: to stage. One will be free to dine where one chooses,
24:21
Speaker 1: hurry when one chooses, travel asleep or awake, stop and
24:25
Speaker 1: pick flowers, turn over in bed of a morning, and
24:28
Speaker 1: tell the carriage to wait, unless, which is highly probable,
24:31
Speaker 1: one sleeps aboard. Footnote. The historian of the future, writing
24:36
Speaker 1: about the nineteenth century, will I sometimes fancy find a
24:40
Speaker 1: new meaning in a familiar phrase. It is the custom
24:43
Speaker 1: to call this the most democratic age the world has
24:45
Speaker 1: ever seen, And most of us are beguiled by the
24:48
Speaker 1: etymological contrast and the memory of certain legislative revolutions to
24:53
Speaker 1: oppose one form of stupidity prevailing to another, and to
24:57
Speaker 1: fancy we mean the opposite to an aristocratic period. But
25:01
Speaker 1: indeed we do not, so far as that political point goes.
25:05
Speaker 1: The Chinaman has always been infinitely more democratic than the
25:08
Speaker 1: European but the world by a series of gradations into error,
25:13
Speaker 1: has come to use democratic as a substitute for wholesale
25:17
Speaker 1: and as an opposite to individual, without realizing the shifted
25:21
Speaker 1: application at all. Whereby old aristocracy the organization of society
25:27
Speaker 1: for the glory and preservation of the select dull gets
25:30
Speaker 1: to a flavor even of freedom. When the historian of
25:34
Speaker 1: the future speaks of the past century as a democratic century,
25:38
Speaker 1: he will have in mind, more than anything else, the
25:40
Speaker 1: unprecedented fact that we seemed to do everything in heaps,
25:45
Speaker 1: we read in epidemics, clothed ourselves all over the world
25:48
Speaker 1: in identical fashions, built and furnished our houses and stereo designs,
25:53
Speaker 1: and traveled that naturally most individual proceeding in bales. To
25:58
Speaker 1: make the railway train the perfect symbol of our times,
26:01
Speaker 1: it should be presented as uncomfortably full in the third class,
26:05
Speaker 1: a few passengers standing, and everybody reading the current number,
26:08
Speaker 1: either of the Daily Mail, Pearson's Weekly Answers, tit Bits,
26:13
Speaker 1: or whatever greatest novel of the sentry happen to be going.
26:17
Speaker 1: But as I hope to make clearer in my later papers,
26:19
Speaker 1: this democracy, or wholesale method of living, like the railways,
26:24
Speaker 1: is transient. A first makeshift development of a great and finally,
26:28
Speaker 1: to me at least quite hopeful social reorganization end footnote.
26:34
Speaker 1: And thirdly, there will be the motor omnibus attacking or
26:38
Speaker 1: developing out of the horse omnibus companies and the suburban lines.
26:42
Speaker 1: All this seems fairly safe prophecying. And these things, which
26:46
Speaker 1: are quite obviously coming even now, will be working out
26:50
Speaker 1: their many structural problems when the next phase in their
26:52
Speaker 1: development begins. The motor omnibus companies, competing against the suburban
26:57
Speaker 1: railways will find themselves hampered in the speed of their
27:00
Speaker 1: longer runs by the slower horse traffic on their routes,
27:03
Speaker 1: and they will attempt to secure, and it may be,
27:05
Speaker 1: after tough legislative struggles, will secure the power to form
27:10
Speaker 1: private roads of a new sort, upon which their vehicles
27:13
Speaker 1: will be free to travel up to the limit of
27:15
Speaker 1: their very highest possible speed. It is along the line
27:19
Speaker 1: of such private tracks and roads that the forces of
27:22
Speaker 1: change will certainly tend to travel, and along which I
27:25
Speaker 1: am absolutely convinced they will travel. This segregation of motor
27:30
Speaker 1: traffic is probably a matter that may begin even in
27:32
Speaker 1: the present decade. Once this process of segregation from the
27:37
Speaker 1: high road of the horse and pedestrians sets in. It
27:40
Speaker 1: will probably go on rapidly. It may spread out from
27:43
Speaker 1: short omnibus routes, much as the London Metropolitan Railway system
27:47
Speaker 1: has spread. The motor carrier companies, competing in speed of
27:51
Speaker 1: delivery with the quickened railways, will conceivably cooperate with the
27:55
Speaker 1: long distance omnibus and the hired carriage companies in the
27:58
Speaker 1: formation of trunk lines. Almost insensibly, certain highly profitable longer
28:03
Speaker 1: routes will be joined up the London to Brighton, for example,
28:07
Speaker 1: in England, and the quiet English citizen will, no doubt,
28:10
Speaker 1: while these things are still quite exceptional and experimental in
28:13
Speaker 1: his lagging land, read one day with surprise in the
28:17
Speaker 1: violently illustrated popular magazines of nineteen ten that there are
28:21
Speaker 1: now so many thousand miles of these roads already established
28:24
Speaker 1: in America and Germany and elsewhere, and whereupon, after some
28:28
Speaker 1: patriotic meditations, he may pull himself together. We may even
28:33
Speaker 1: hazard some details about these special roads. For example, they
28:38
Speaker 1: will be very different from macadamized roads. They will be
28:42
Speaker 1: used only by soft tired conveyances, the battering horseshoes, the
28:46
Speaker 1: perpetual filth of horse traffic, and the clumsy wheels of
28:49
Speaker 1: laden carts will never wear them. It may be that
28:52
Speaker 1: they will have a surface like that of some cycle
28:55
Speaker 1: racing tracks, though since they will be open to wind
28:58
Speaker 1: and weather, it is perhaps more probable that they will
29:00
Speaker 1: be made of very good asphalt slope to drain, and
29:04
Speaker 1: still more probable that they will be of some quite
29:06
Speaker 1: new substance. Altogether, whether hard or resilient, is beyond my foretelling.
29:11
Speaker 1: They will have to be very wide. They will be
29:14
Speaker 1: just as wide as the courage of their promoters goes,
29:17
Speaker 1: and if the first made are too narrow, there will
29:19
Speaker 1: be no question of gauge to limit the later ones.
29:23
Speaker 1: Their traffic in opposite directions will probably be strictly separated,
29:27
Speaker 1: and it will no doubt habitually disregard complicated and fussy
29:30
Speaker 1: regulations imposed under the initiative of the railway interest by
29:34
Speaker 1: such official bodies as the Board of Trade. The promoters
29:38
Speaker 1: will doubtless take a hint from suburban railway traffic and
29:40
Speaker 1: from the current difficulty of the Metropolitan Police, and where
29:44
Speaker 1: their ways branch. The streams of traffic will not cross
29:47
Speaker 1: at a level, but by bridges. It is easily conceivable
29:51
Speaker 1: that once these tracks are in existence, cyclists and motors
29:54
Speaker 1: other than those of the constructing companies will be able
29:56
Speaker 1: to make use of them. And moreover, once they exist,
30:00
Speaker 1: it will be possible to experiment with vehicles of a
30:03
Speaker 1: size and power quite beyond the dimensions prescribed by our
30:06
Speaker 1: ordinary roads, roads whose width has been entirely determined by
30:10
Speaker 1: the size of a cart a horse can pull. Footnote.
30:15
Speaker 1: So we begin to see the possibility of laying that
30:18
Speaker 1: phantom horse that haunts the railways to this day so disastrously.
30:22
Speaker 1: End footnote end of chapter one AIM recording by John
30:27
Speaker 1: Trevedk