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The World Set Free Chapter 1 - The Sun Snarers Part 1 · The H. G. Wells Library

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Speaker 1: Chapter one of the World Set Free by H. G. Wells.
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Speaker 1: This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
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Speaker 1: the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
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Speaker 1: visit LibriVox dot org. Recording by Adam Marcitich, June two
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Speaker 1: thousand nine, Alexandria, Virginia, The World Set Free by H. G. Wells,
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Speaker 1: Chapter the first The New source of Energy, Section one.
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Speaker 1: The problem which was already being mooted by such scientific
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Speaker 1: men as Ramsay, Rutherford, and Sadi in the very beginning
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Speaker 1: of the twentieth century. The problem of inducing radioactivity in
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Speaker 1: the heavier elements, and so tapping the internal energy of
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Speaker 1: atoms was solved by a wonderful combination of induction, intuition,
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Speaker 1: and luck by Holsten so soon as the year nineteen
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Speaker 1: thirty three, from the first detection of radioactivity to its
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Speaker 1: first subjugation to human purpose measured little more than a
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Speaker 1: quarter of a century. For twenty years after that, indeed,
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Speaker 1: minor difficulties prevented any striking practical application of his success,
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Speaker 1: But the essential thing was done. This new boundary in
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Speaker 1: the march of human progress was crossed. In that year
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Speaker 1: he set up atomic disintegration in a minute particle of bismuth.
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Speaker 1: It exploded with great violence into a heavy gas of
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Speaker 1: extreme radioactivity, which disintegrated in its turn in the course
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Speaker 1: of seven days. And it was only after another year's
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Speaker 1: work that he was able to show practically that the
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Speaker 1: last result of this rapid release of energy was gold.
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Speaker 1: But the thing was done at the cost of a
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Speaker 1: blistered chest and an injured finger. And from the moment
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Speaker 1: when the invisible speck of bismuth flashed into and rending energy,
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Speaker 1: Holston knew that he had opened a way for mankind,
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Speaker 1: however narrow and dark it might still be, to worlds
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Speaker 1: of limitless power. He recorded as much in the Strange
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Speaker 1: Diary Biography. He left the world, a diary that was,
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Speaker 1: up to that particular moment, a mass of speculations and calculations,
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Speaker 1: and which suddenly became for a space an amazingly minute
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Speaker 1: and human record of sensations and emotions that all humanity
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Speaker 1: might understand. He gives in broken phrases and often single words,
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Speaker 1: it is true, but nonetheless vividly for that a record
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Speaker 1: of the twenty four hours following the demonstration of the
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Speaker 1: correctness of his intricate tracery of computations and guesses. I
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Speaker 1: thought I should not sleep, he writes. The words omitted
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Speaker 1: are supplied in brackets. On account of pain in the
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Speaker 1: hand and chest, and the wonder of what I had done,
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Speaker 1: slept like a child. He felt strange and disconcerted. The
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Speaker 1: next morning he had nothing to do. He was living
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Speaker 1: alone in apartments in Bloomsbury, and he decided to go
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Speaker 1: up to Hampstead Heath, which he had known when he
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Speaker 1: was a little boy as a breezy playground. He went
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Speaker 1: up by the underground tube that was then the recognized
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Speaker 1: means of travel from one part of London to another,
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Speaker 1: and walked up Heath Street from the tube station to
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Speaker 1: the open heath. He found it a gully of planks
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Speaker 1: and scaffoldings between the hoardings of house wreckers. The spirit
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Speaker 1: of the times had seized upon that narrow, steep and
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Speaker 1: winding thoroughfare, and was in the act of making it
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Speaker 1: commodious and interesting. According to the remarkable ideals of Neo
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Speaker 1: Georgian aestheticism, such is the illogical quality of humanity that Holston,
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Speaker 1: fresh from work that was like a pitard under the
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Speaker 1: seat of current civilization, saw these changes with regret. He
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Speaker 1: had come up Heath Street perhaps a thousand times, had
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Speaker 1: known the windows of all the little shops, spent hours
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Speaker 1: in the varnished cinematograph there, and marveled at the high
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Speaker 1: flung early Georgian houses upon the westward bank of that
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Speaker 1: old gully of a thoroughfare. He felt strange with all
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Speaker 1: these familiar things gone. He escaped at last, with a
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Speaker 1: feeling of relief, from this choked alley of trenches and
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Speaker 1: holes and cranes, and emerged upon the old, familiar scene
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Speaker 1: about the white Stone Pond, that at least was very
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Speaker 1: much as it used to be. There were still the
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Speaker 1: fine old red brick houses to left and right of him.
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Speaker 1: The reservoir had been improved by a portico of marble.
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Speaker 1: The white fronted inn, with the clustering flowers above its portico,
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Speaker 1: still stood out at the angle of the ways, and
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Speaker 1: the blue view to Harrow Hill and Harrow's Spire. A
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Speaker 1: view of hills and trees and shining waters and wind
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Speaker 1: driven cloud shadows was like the opening of a great
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Speaker 1: window to the ascending londoner. All that was very reassuring.
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Speaker 1: There was the same strolling crowd, the same perpetual miracle
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Speaker 1: of motors dodging through it harmlessly, escaping headlong into the
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Speaker 1: country from the sabbatical stuffiness. Behind and below them there
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Speaker 1: was a band still, a women's suffrage meeting for the
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Speaker 1: suffrage women had won their way back to the tolerance
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Speaker 1: a trifle derisive of the populace again, socialists, orators, politicians,
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Speaker 1: a band the same wild uproar of dogs, frantic with
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Speaker 1: the gladness of their one blessed weekly released from the
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Speaker 1: back yard and the chain, and away along the road
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Speaker 1: to the Spaniards, strolled a vast multitude, saying, as ever
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Speaker 1: that the view of London was exceptionally clear that day.
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Speaker 1: Young Holston's face was white. He walked with that uneasy
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Speaker 1: affection of ease that marks an over strained nervous system
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Speaker 1: and an under exercised body. He hesitated at the white
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Speaker 1: Stone Pond, whether to go to the left of it
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Speaker 1: or the right, and again at the fork of the roads.
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Speaker 1: He kept shifting his stick in his hand, and every
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Speaker 1: now and then he would get in the way of
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Speaker 1: people on the footpath or be jostled by them. Because
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Speaker 1: of the uncertainty of his movements, he felt, he confesses
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Speaker 1: inadequate to ordinary existence. He seemed to himself to be
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Speaker 1: something inhuman and mischievous. All the people about him looked
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Speaker 1: fairly prosperous, fairly happy, fairly well adapted to the lives
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Speaker 1: they had to lead a week of work in a
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Speaker 1: Sunday of best clothes and mild promenading. And he had
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Speaker 1: long munched something that would disorganize the entire fabric that
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Speaker 1: held their contentments and ambitions and satisfactions together. Felt like
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Speaker 1: an imbecile who was presented a box full of loaded
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Speaker 1: revolvers to a crash. He notes. He met a man
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Speaker 1: named Lawson, an old schoolfellow of whom history now knows
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Speaker 1: only that he was red faced and had a terrier.
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Speaker 1: He and Holston walked together, and Holston was sufficiently pale
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Speaker 1: and jumpy for Lawson to tell him he overworked and
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Speaker 1: needed a holiday. They sat down at a little table
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Speaker 1: outside the County Council House of Golders Hill Park and
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Speaker 1: set one of the waiters to the bowl and bush
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Speaker 1: for a couple of bottles of beer. No doubt at
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Speaker 1: Lawson's suggestion. The beer warmed Holston's rather dehumanized system. He
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Speaker 1: began to tell Lawson as clearly as he could to
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Speaker 1: what his great discovery amounted. Lawson feigned attention, but indeed
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Speaker 1: he had neither the knowledge nor the imagination to understand.
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Speaker 1: In the end, before many years are out, this must
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Speaker 1: eventually change war, transit, lighting, building, and every sort of manufacture,
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Speaker 1: even agriculture, every material human concern. Then Holstone stopped short.
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Speaker 1: Lawson had leaped to his feet. Damn that dog, cried Lawson,
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Speaker 1: look at it now, aig here, Phew, phew, phew, Come here, Bobs,
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Speaker 1: come here. The young scientific man, with his bandaged hand,
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Speaker 1: sat at the green table, too tired to convey the
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Speaker 1: wonder of the thing he had sought so long. His
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Speaker 1: friend whistled and bawled for his dog, and the Sunday
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Speaker 1: people drifted about them through the spring sunshine. For a
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Speaker 1: moment or so, Holston stared at Lawson in astonishment, for
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Speaker 1: he had been too intent upon what he had been
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Speaker 1: saying to realize how little Lawson had attended. Then he
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Speaker 1: remarked well, and smiled faintly, and finished the tankard of
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Speaker 1: beer before him. Lawson sat down again. One must look
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Speaker 1: after one's dog, he said, with a note of apology.
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Speaker 1: What was it you were telling me section two. In
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Speaker 1: the evening, Holston went out again. He walked to Saint
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Speaker 1: Paul's Cathedral and stood for a time near the door,
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Speaker 1: listening to the evening service. The candles upon the altar
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Speaker 1: reminded him, in some odd way of the fireflies at
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Speaker 1: fiaz Lea. Then he walked back through the evening lights
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Speaker 1: to Westminster. He was oppressed. He was indeed scared by
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Speaker 1: his sense of the immense consequences of his discovery. He
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Speaker 1: had a vague idea that night that he ought not
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Speaker 1: to publish his results, that they were premature, that some
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Speaker 1: secret association of wise men should take care of his
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Speaker 1: work and hand it on from generation to generation until
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Speaker 1: the world was riper for its practical application. He felt
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Speaker 1: that nobody in all the thousands of people he passed
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Speaker 1: had really awakened to the fact of change. They trusted
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Speaker 1: the world for what it was not to alter too rapidly,
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Speaker 1: to respect their trusts, their assurances, their habits, their little
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Speaker 1: accustomed traffics and hard won positions. He went into those
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Speaker 1: little gardens beneath the overhanging, brightly lit masses of the
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Speaker 1: Savoy Hotel and the Hotel Cecil. He sat down on
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Speaker 1: a seat and became aware of the talk of the
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Speaker 1: two people next to him. It was a talk of
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Speaker 1: a young couple, evidently on the eve of marriage. The
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Speaker 1: man was congratulating himself on having regular employment at last.
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Speaker 1: They like me, he said, And I like the job.
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Speaker 1: If I work up in a dozen years or so,
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Speaker 1: I ought to be get and something pretty comfortable. That's
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Speaker 1: the plain sense of it, Hetty. There ain't no reason
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Speaker 1: whatsoever why we shouldn't get along very decently, very decently. Indeed,
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Speaker 1: the desire for little successes amidst conditions securely fixed. So
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Speaker 1: it struck upon Holston's mind. He added in his diary,
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Speaker 1: I had a sense of all this globe as that.
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Speaker 1: By that phrase he meant a kind of clairvoyant vision
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Speaker 1: of this populated world as a whole, of all its
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Speaker 1: cities and towns and villages, its high roads and the
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Speaker 1: inns beside them, its gardens and farms and upland pastures,
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Speaker 1: its boatmen and sailors, its ships coming along the great
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Speaker 1: circles of the ocean, its timetables and appointments and payments
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Speaker 1: and dues, as if it were one unified and progressive spectacle.
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Speaker 1: Sometimes such visions came to him. His mind, accustomed to
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Speaker 1: great generalizations and yet acutely sensitive to detail, softenings far
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Speaker 1: more comprehensively than the minds of most of his contemporaries. Usually,
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Speaker 1: the teeming sphere moved on to its predestined ends, and
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Speaker 1: circled with a stately swiftness on its path about the sun.
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Speaker 1: Usually it was all a living progress that altered under
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Speaker 1: his regard. But now fatigue a little deadened him to
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Speaker 1: that incessancy of life. It seemed now just an eternal circling.
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Speaker 1: He lapsed to the commoner persuasion of the great fixities
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Speaker 1: and recurrences of the human routine, the remoter past of
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Speaker 1: wandering savagery, the inevitable changes of tomorrow were veiled, and
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Speaker 1: he saw only day and night, seed time and harvest,
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Speaker 1: loving and begetting, births and deaths, walks in the summer sunlight,
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Speaker 1: and tails by the winter fireside, the ancient sequence of
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Speaker 1: hope and acts and age perennially renewed, eddying on forever
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Speaker 1: and ever, save that. Now the impious hand of research
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Speaker 1: was raised to overthrow this drowsy, gently humming, habitual, sunlit
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Speaker 1: spinning top of man's existence. For a time he forgot
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Speaker 1: wars and crimes, and hates and persecutions, famine and pestilence,
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Speaker 1: the cruelties of beasts, weariness and the bitter wind, failure
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Speaker 1: and insufficiency and retrocession. He saw all mankind in terms
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Speaker 1: of the humble Sunday couple upon the seat beside him,
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Speaker 1: who schemed their inglorious outlook and improbable contentments. I had
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Speaker 1: a sense of all this globe, as that his intelligence
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Speaker 1: struggled against this mood, and struggled for a time in vain.
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Speaker 1: He reassured himself against the invasion of this disconcerting idea,
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Speaker 1: that he was something strange and inhuman, a loose wanderer
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Speaker 1: from the flock, returning with evil gifts from his sustained
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Speaker 1: unnatural excursions amidst the darkness and phosphorescences beneath the fair
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Speaker 1: surfaces of life. Man had not been always. Thus, the
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Speaker 1: instincts and desires of little Home, the little plot, was
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Speaker 1: not all his nature. Also, he was an adventurer, an experimenter,
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Speaker 1: an unresting curiosity, an insatiable desire for a few thousand generations. Indeed,
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Speaker 1: he had tilled the earth and followed the seasons, saying
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Speaker 1: his prayers, grinding his corn and trampling the october wine press.
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Speaker 1: Yet not for so long, but that he was still
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Speaker 1: full of restless stirrings. If there have been home and
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Speaker 1: routine in the field, thought Holston, there have also been
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Speaker 1: wonder and the sea. He turned his head and looked
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Speaker 1: up over the back of the seat at the great
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Speaker 1: hotels above him, full of softly shaded lights, and the
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Speaker 1: glow and color and stir of feasting. Might his gift
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Speaker 1: to mankind mean simply more of that? He got up
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Speaker 1: and walked out of the garden, surveying a passing tramcar
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Speaker 1: laden with warm light against the deep blues of evening,
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Speaker 1: dripping and trailing long skirts of shining reflection. He crossed
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Speaker 1: the embankment and stood for a time, watching the dark river,
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Speaker 1: and turning ever and again to the lit buildings and bridges.
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Speaker 1: His mind began to scheme conceivable replacements of all those
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Speaker 1: clustering arrangements. It has begun, he writes in the diary
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Speaker 1: in which these things are recorded. It is not for
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Speaker 1: me to reach out to consequences. I cannot foresee. I
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Speaker 1: am a part, not a hole. I am a little
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Speaker 1: instrument in the armory of change. If I were to
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Speaker 1: burn all these papers before a score of years had passed,
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Speaker 1: some other man would be doing this Section three. Holston,
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Speaker 1: before he died, was destined to see atomic energy dominating
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Speaker 1: every other source of power. But for some years yet
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Speaker 1: a vast network of difficulties in detail and application kept
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Speaker 1: the new discovery from any effective invasion of ordinary life.
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Speaker 1: The path from the laboratory to the workshop is sometimes
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Speaker 1: a tortuous one. Electromagnetic radiations were known and demonstrated for
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Speaker 1: twenty years before Marconi made them practically available, and in
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Speaker 1: the same way, it was twenty years before induced radioactivity
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Speaker 1: could be brought to practical utilization. The thing, of course,
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Speaker 1: was discussed very much more, perhaps at the time of
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Speaker 1: its discovery than during the interval of technical adaptation, but
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Speaker 1: with very little realization of the huge economic revolution that impended.
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Speaker 1: What chiefly impressed the jajournalists of nineteen thirty three was
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Speaker 1: a production of gold from bismuth and the realization, albeit
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Speaker 1: upon unprofitable lines, of the alchemist's dreams. There was a
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Speaker 1: considerable amount of discussion and expectation in that more intelligent
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Speaker 1: section of the educated publics of the various civilized countries
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Speaker 1: which followed scientific development. But for the most part the
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Speaker 1: world went about its business as the inhabitants of those
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Speaker 1: Swiss villages which live under the perpetual threat of overhanging
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Speaker 1: rocks and mountains, go about their business just as though
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Speaker 1: the possible was impossible, as though the inevitable was postponed
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Speaker 1: forever because it was delayed. He was in nineteen fifty
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Speaker 1: three that the first Holston Roberts engine brought induced radioactivity
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Speaker 1: into the sphere of industrial production, and its first general
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Speaker 1: use was to replace the steam engine in electrical generating stations.
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Speaker 1: Hard upon the appearance of this came the Dos Tata engine,
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Speaker 1: the invention of two among the brilliant galaxy of Bengali inventors.
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Speaker 1: The modernization of Indian thought was producing at this time,
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Speaker 1: which was used chiefly for automobiles, aeroplanes, waterplanes and such
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Speaker 1: like mobile purposes. The American camp engine, differing widely in
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Speaker 1: principle but equally practicable, and the krupp erlonger came hard
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Speaker 1: upon the heels of this, and by the autumn of
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Speaker 1: nineteen fifty four a gigantic replacement of industrial methods and
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Speaker 1: machinery was in progress. All about the habitable globe. Small
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Speaker 1: wonder was this when the cost even of these earliest
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Speaker 1: and clumsiest of atomic engines, is compared with that of
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Speaker 1: the power they superseded. Allowing for the lubrication of the
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Speaker 1: dos Tata engine, once it was started, cost a penny
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Speaker 1: to run thirty seven miles and added only nine and
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Speaker 1: a quarter pounds to the weight of the carriage it drove.
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Speaker 1: It made the heavy alcohol driven automobile of the time
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Speaker 1: ridiculous in appearance as well as preposterously costly. For many years,
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Speaker 1: the price of coal and every form of liquid fuel
19:22
Speaker 1: had been clambering to levels that made even the revival
19:25
Speaker 1: of the draft horse seem a practicable possibility. And now,
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Speaker 1: with the abrupt relaxation of this stringency, the change in
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Speaker 1: appearance of the traffic upon the world's roads was instantaneous.
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Speaker 1: In three years, the frightful armored monsters that had hooted
19:43
Speaker 1: and smoked and thundered about the world for four awful
19:47
Speaker 1: decades were swept away to the dealers in old metal,
19:51
Speaker 1: and the highways thronged with light and clean and shimmering
19:55
Speaker 1: shapes of silvered steel. At the same time, a new
19:59
Speaker 1: impetus given to aviation by the relatively enormous power for
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Speaker 1: weight of the atomic engine. It was at last possible
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Speaker 1: to add Redmain's ingenious helicopter ascent and descent engine to
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Speaker 1: the vertical propeller that had hitherto been the sole driving
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Speaker 1: force of the aeroplane without overweighting the machine. And men
20:20
Speaker 1: found themselves possessed of an instrument of flight that could
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Speaker 1: hover or ascend or descend vertically and gently, as well
20:28
Speaker 1: as rush wildly through the air. The last dread of
20:32
Speaker 1: flying vanished. As the journalists of the time phrased it,
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Speaker 1: this was the epoch of the leap into the air.
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Speaker 1: The new atomic aeroplane became indeed a mania. Every one
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Speaker 1: of means was frantic to possess a thing so controllable,
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Speaker 1: so secure, and so free from dust and danger of
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Speaker 1: the road. And in France alone, in the year nineteen
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Speaker 1: forty three, thirty thousand of these new aeroplanes were manufactured
20:59
Speaker 1: and licensed and soared hummingly, softly into the sky and
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Speaker 1: with an equal speed. Atomic engines of various types invaded industrialism.
21:10
Speaker 1: The railways paid enormous premiums for priority in the delivery
21:14
Speaker 1: of atomic traction engines. Atomic smelting was embarked upon so
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Speaker 1: eagerly as to lead to a number of disastrous explosions
21:23
Speaker 1: due to inexperienced handling of the new power and the
21:27
Speaker 1: revolutionary cheapening of both materials and electricity made the entire
21:32
Speaker 1: reconstruction of domestic buildings a matter merely dependent upon a
21:37
Speaker 1: reorganization of the methods of the builder and the house furniture.
21:42
Speaker 1: Viewed from the side of the new power, and from
21:45
Speaker 1: the point of view of those who financed and manufactured
21:48
Speaker 1: the new engines and material it required, the age of
21:52
Speaker 1: the leap into the air was one of astonishing prosperity.
21:57
Speaker 1: Patent holding companies were presently paying dividends of five or
22:01
Speaker 1: six hundred percent, and enormous fortunes were made and fantastic
22:06
Speaker 1: wages earned by all who were concerned in the new development.
22:11
Speaker 1: This prosperity was not a little enhanced by the fact
22:15
Speaker 1: that in both the Das Tata and Holston Roberts engines,
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Speaker 1: one of the recoverable waste products was gold, the former
22:24
Speaker 1: disintegrated dust of bismuth and the latter dust of lead,
22:28
Speaker 1: and that this new supply of gold led quite naturally
22:31
Speaker 1: to arise in prices throughout the world. This spectacle of
22:36
Speaker 1: feverish enterprise was productivity. This crowding flight of happy and
22:41
Speaker 1: fortunate rich people. Every great city was as if a
22:45
Speaker 1: crawling ant hill had suddenly taken wing. Was the bright
22:49
Speaker 1: side of the opening phase of the new epoch in
22:52
Speaker 1: human history. Beneath that brightness was a gathering darkness, a
22:57
Speaker 1: deepening dismay. If there was a mast development of production,
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Speaker 1: there was also a huge destruction of values. These glaring
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Speaker 1: factories working night and day, These glittering new vehicles swinging
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Speaker 1: noiselessly along the roads, These flights of dragon flies that
23:15
Speaker 1: swooped and soared and circled in the air, were indeed
23:19
Speaker 1: no more than the brightness of lamps and fires that
23:22
Speaker 1: gleam out when the world sinks towards twilight and the
23:26
Speaker 1: night between these high lights accumulated disaster, social catastrophe. The
23:33
Speaker 1: coal mines were manifestly doomed to closure. At no very
23:37
Speaker 1: distant date, the vast amount of capital invested in oil
23:41
Speaker 1: was becoming unsaleable. Millions of coal miners, steel workers upon
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Speaker 1: the old lines, Vast swarms of unskilled or under skilled
23:51
Speaker 1: laborers in innumerable occupations were being flung out of employment
23:56
Speaker 1: by the superior efficiency of the new machinery. The rapid
24:00
Speaker 1: fall in the cost of transit was destroying high land values.
24:05
Speaker 1: At every center of population. The value of existing house
24:09
Speaker 1: property had become problematical. Gold was undergoing headlong depreciation. All
24:15
Speaker 1: the securities upon which the credit of the world rested
24:19
Speaker 1: were slipping and sliding. Banks were tottering. The stock exchanges
24:24
Speaker 1: were scenes of feverish panic. This was the reverse of
24:28
Speaker 1: the spectacle. These were the black and monstrous under consequences
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Speaker 1: of the leap into the air. There is a story
24:36
Speaker 1: of a demented London stockbroker running into the thread Needle
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Speaker 1: Street and tearing off his clothes as he ran. The
24:44
Speaker 1: Steel Trust is scrapping the whole of its plant, he shouted.
24:48
Speaker 1: The state railways are going to scrap all their engines.
24:52
Speaker 1: Everything's going to be scrapped everything. Come and scrap the mint,
24:57
Speaker 1: you fellows, Come and scrap the mint. In the year
25:00
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty five, the suicide rate for the United States
25:04
Speaker 1: of America quadrupled any previous record. There was an enormous
25:09
Speaker 1: increase also in violent crime throughout the world. The thing
25:13
Speaker 1: had come upon an unprepared humanity. It seemed as though
25:17
Speaker 1: human society was to be smashed by its own magnificent gains,
25:23
Speaker 1: for there had been no foresight of these things. There
25:26
Speaker 1: had been no attempt anywhere even to compute the probable
25:30
Speaker 1: dislocations this flood of inexpensive energy would produce in human affairs.
25:36
Speaker 1: The world in these days was not really governed at all,
25:39
Speaker 1: in the sense in which government came to be understood
25:42
Speaker 1: in subsequent years. Government was a treaty, not a design.
25:47
Speaker 1: It was forensic, conservative, disputatious, unseeing, unthinking, uncreative. Throughout the world,
25:55
Speaker 1: except where the vestiges of absolutism still sheltered the court
26:00
Speaker 1: favorite and the trusted servant. It was in the hands
26:04
Speaker 1: of the predominant caste of lawyers, who had an enormous
26:08
Speaker 1: advantage in being the only trained cast Their professional education,
26:13
Speaker 1: and every circumstance in the manipulation of the fantastically naive
26:19
Speaker 1: electoral methods by which they clambered to power, conspired to
26:23
Speaker 1: keep them contemptuous of facts, conscientiously unimaginative, alert to claim
26:30
Speaker 1: and seize advantages, and suspicious of every generosity. Government was
26:36
Speaker 1: an obstructive business of energetic fractions. Progress went on outside,
26:41
Speaker 1: and in spite of public activities and legislation, was the
26:46
Speaker 1: last crippling recognition of needs so clamorous and imperative, and
26:51
Speaker 1: facts so aggressively established as to invade even the dingy
26:56
Speaker 1: seclusions of the judges and threaten the very existence of
27:01
Speaker 1: the otherwise inattentive political machine. The world was so little
27:05
Speaker 1: governed that with the very coming of plenty, in the
27:09
Speaker 1: full tide of an incalculable abundance, when everything necessary to
27:14
Speaker 1: satisfy human needs, and everything necessary to realize such will
27:18
Speaker 1: and purpose as existed then in human hearts, was already
27:23
Speaker 1: at hand, one has still to tell of hardship, famine, anger, confusion, conflict,
27:30
Speaker 1: and incoherent suffering. There was no scheme for the distribution
27:35
Speaker 1: of this vast new wealth that had come at last
27:38
Speaker 1: within the reach of men. There was no clear conception
27:42
Speaker 1: that any such distribution was possible. As one attempts a
27:46
Speaker 1: comprehensive view of these opening years of the New Age,
27:50
Speaker 1: as one measures it against the latent achievement that later
27:54
Speaker 1: years have demonstrated, one begins to measure the blindness, the narrowness,
27:59
Speaker 1: the insensate, unimaginative individualism of the pre atomic time, under
28:06
Speaker 1: this tremendous dawn of power and freedom, under a sky
28:10
Speaker 1: ablaze with promise, in the very presence of science, standing
28:15
Speaker 1: like some bountiful goddess, over all the squat darkness of
28:19
Speaker 1: human life, holding patiently in her strong arms until men
28:24
Speaker 1: chose to take them. Security plenty, the solution of riddles,
28:29
Speaker 1: the key of the bravest adventurers, in her very presence
28:33
Speaker 1: and with the earnest of her gifts. In court, the
28:36
Speaker 1: world was to witness such things as the squalid spectacle
28:40
Speaker 1: of the Dostata patent litigation. There in a stuffy court
28:45
Speaker 1: in London, a grimy oblong box of a room, during
28:49
Speaker 1: the exceptional heat of the May of nineteen fifty six,
28:54
Speaker 1: the leading council of the day argued and shouted over
28:57
Speaker 1: a miserable little matter of more royalties or less, and
29:01
Speaker 1: whether the Dos Tata company might not bar the Holston
29:05
Speaker 1: Robert's methods of utilizing the new power. The Dos Tata
29:09
Speaker 1: people were indeed making a strenuous attempt to secure a
29:13
Speaker 1: world monopoly in atomic engineering. The judge, after the manner
29:18
Speaker 1: of those times, sat raised above the court, wearing a
29:22
Speaker 1: preposterous gown and a foolish huge wig. The council also
29:27
Speaker 1: wore dirty looking little wigs and queer black gowns over
29:31
Speaker 1: their usual costume wigs and gowns that were held to
29:34
Speaker 1: be necessary to their pleading, and upon unclean wooden benches,
29:39
Speaker 1: stirred and whispered, artful looking solicitors busily scribbling reporters, the
29:45
Speaker 1: parties to the case, expert witnesses, interested people, and a
29:50
Speaker 1: jostling confusion of subpoenaed persons, briefless young barristers forming a
29:56
Speaker 1: style on the most esteemed and truculent examples, and casual
30:01
Speaker 1: eccentric spectators who preferred this pit of iniquity to the
30:06
Speaker 1: free sunlight outside. Everyone was damply hot. The examining king's
30:12
Speaker 1: counsel wiped the perspiration from his huge, clean shaven upper
30:16
Speaker 1: lip and into this atmosphere of grasping contention and human exultations.
30:23
Speaker 1: The daylight filtered through a window that was manifestly dirty.
30:28
Speaker 1: The jury sat in a double pew to the left
30:31
Speaker 1: of the judge, looking as uncomfortable as frogs that had
30:35
Speaker 1: fallen into an ash pit, And in the witness box
30:38
Speaker 1: lied the would be omnivorous dos under cross examination Holston
30:44
Speaker 1: had always been accustomed to publish his results so soon
30:48
Speaker 1: as they appeared to him to be sufficiently advanced to
30:51
Speaker 1: furnish a basis for further work. And to that confiding disposition,
30:56
Speaker 1: and one happy flash of adaptive invention, the aline alert
31:00
Speaker 1: das owed his claim. But indeed a vast multitude of
31:04
Speaker 1: such sharp people were clutching, patenting, pre empting, monopolizing this
31:09
Speaker 1: or that feature of the new development, seeking to subdue
31:13
Speaker 1: this gigantic, winged power to the purposes of their little
31:17
Speaker 1: lusts and avarice. That trial is just one of innumerable
31:21
Speaker 1: disputes of the same kind. For a time the face
31:25
Speaker 1: of the world festered with patent legislation. It chanced, however,
31:30
Speaker 1: to have one oddly dramatic feature, in the fact that Holston,
31:35
Speaker 1: after being kept waiting about the court for two days
31:38
Speaker 1: as a beggar might have waited at a rich man's door,
31:42
Speaker 1: after being bullied by ushers and watched by policemen, was
31:46
Speaker 1: called as a witness, rather severely handled by counsel and
31:50
Speaker 1: told not to quibble by the judge. When he was
31:53
Speaker 1: trying to be absolutely explicit. The judge scratched his nose
31:58
Speaker 1: with a quill pen and sneered at Holston's astonishment round
32:03
Speaker 1: the corner of his monstrous wig. Holston was a great man,
32:07
Speaker 1: was he well? In a law court, great men were
32:11
Speaker 1: put in their places. We want to know has the
32:14
Speaker 1: plaintiff added anything to this or hasn't he said the judge.
32:20
Speaker 1: We don't want to have your views whether Sir Philip
32:23
Speaker 1: Doss's improvements were merely superficial adaptations, or whether they were
32:29
Speaker 1: implicit in your paper, No doubt. After the manner of inventors,
32:34
Speaker 1: you think most things that were ever likely to be
32:37
Speaker 1: discovered are implicit in your papers, no doubt. Also you
32:42
Speaker 1: think too that most subsequent editions and modifications are merely superficial.
32:48
Speaker 1: Inventors have a way of thinking that the law isn't
32:52
Speaker 1: concerned with that sort of thing. The law has nothing
32:55
Speaker 1: to do with the vanity of inventors. The law is
32:59
Speaker 1: concerned with the question whether these patent rights have the
33:02
Speaker 1: novelty the plaintiff claims for them, what the admission may
33:07
Speaker 1: or may not stop, and all these other things you
33:11
Speaker 1: were saying in your overflowing zeal to answer more than
33:14
Speaker 1: the questions addressed to you. None of these things have
33:18
Speaker 1: anything whatever to do with the case in hand. It
33:22
Speaker 1: is a matter of constant astonishment to me in this
33:25
Speaker 1: court to see how you scientific men, with all your
33:29
Speaker 1: extraordinary claims to precision and veracity, wander and wander so
33:35
Speaker 1: soon as you get into the witness box. I know
33:38
Speaker 1: no more unsatisfactory class of witness. The plain and simple
33:43
Speaker 1: question is, has Sir Philip Dos made any real addition
33:48
Speaker 1: to existing knowledge and methods in this matter? Or has
33:52
Speaker 1: he not? We don't want to know whether they were
33:55
Speaker 1: larger small additions, nor what the consequences of your admisison
34:00
Speaker 1: may be that you will leave to us. Holston was silent. Darlie,
34:07
Speaker 1: said the judge, almost pityingly. No he hasn't, said Holston,
34:13
Speaker 1: perceiving that for once in his life he must disregard infinitesimals. Ah,
34:20
Speaker 1: said the judge, Now, why couldn't you say that? When
34:23
Speaker 1: counsel put the question, An entry in Holston's diary autobiography,
34:30
Speaker 1: dated five days later, runs still amazed. The law is
34:35
Speaker 1: the most dangerous thing in this country. It is hundreds
34:38
Speaker 1: of years old. It hasn't an idea. The oldest of
34:41
Speaker 1: old bottles, and this new wine, the most explosive wine.
34:46
Speaker 1: Something will overtake them. Section four. There was a certain
34:54
Speaker 1: truth in Holston's assertion that the law was hundreds of
34:58
Speaker 1: years old. It was, in relation to current thought and
35:02
Speaker 1: widely accepted ideas, an archaic thing. While almost all the
35:07
Speaker 1: material and methods of life had been changing rapidly, and
35:11
Speaker 1: were now changing still more rapidly, the law courts and
35:15
Speaker 1: the legislatures of the world were struggling desperately to meet
35:19
Speaker 1: modern demands with devices and procedures. Conceptions of rights and property,
35:25
Speaker 1: and authority and obligation that dated from the rude compromises
35:29
Speaker 1: of relatively barbaric times. The horsehair whigs and antic dresses
35:35
Speaker 1: of the British judges, their musty courts and overbearing manners
35:40
Speaker 1: were indeed only the outward and visible intimations of profounder anachronisms.
35:46
Speaker 1: The legal and political organization of the earth in the
35:50
Speaker 1: middle twentieth century was indeed everywhere like a complicated garment,
35:55
Speaker 1: outworn yet strong, that now fettered the governing body that
36:00
Speaker 1: once it had protected. Yet that same spirit of freethinking
36:04
Speaker 1: and outspoken publication that in the field of natural science
36:09
Speaker 1: had been the beginning of the conquest of nature was
36:12
Speaker 1: at work throughout all the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, preparing
36:17
Speaker 1: the spirit of the new world within the degenerating body
36:21
Speaker 1: of the old. The idea of a greater subordination of
36:26
Speaker 1: individual interests and established institutions to the collective future is
36:32
Speaker 1: traceable more and more clearly in the literature of those times,
36:36
Speaker 1: and movement after movement frettered itself away in criticism of
36:42
Speaker 1: and opposition to, first this aspect and then that of
36:47
Speaker 1: the legal, social, and political order. Already in the early
36:52
Speaker 1: nineteenth century, Shelley, with no scrap of alternative, is denouncing
36:57
Speaker 1: the established rulers of the world as anarchs, and the
37:01
Speaker 1: entire system of ideas and suggestions that was known as socialism,
37:07
Speaker 1: and more particularly its international side feeble as it was
37:12
Speaker 1: in creative proposals or any method of transition, still witnesses
37:17
Speaker 1: to the growth of a conception of a modernized system
37:21
Speaker 1: of inter relationships that should supplant the existing tangle of
37:25
Speaker 1: proprietary legal ideas. The word sociology was invented by Herbert Spencer,
37:33
Speaker 1: a popular writer upon the philosophical subjects who flourished about
37:38
Speaker 1: the middle of the nineteenth century. But the idea of
37:41
Speaker 1: a state planned as an electric traction system is planned
37:47
Speaker 1: without reference to pre existing apparatus upon scientific lines did
37:52
Speaker 1: not take a very strong hold upon the popular imagination
37:55
Speaker 1: of the world until the twentieth century. Then, the growing
38:00
Speaker 1: impatience of the American people with the monstrous and socially
38:05
Speaker 1: paralyzing party systems that had sprung out of their absurd
38:09
Speaker 1: electoral arrangements led to the appearance of what came to
38:13
Speaker 1: be called the modern state movement, and a galaxy of
38:17
Speaker 1: brilliant writers in America, Europe and the East stirred up
38:22
Speaker 1: the world to the thought of bolder rearrangements of social interaction, property, employment, education,
38:30
Speaker 1: and government than had ever been contemplated before. No doubt,
38:35
Speaker 1: these modern state ideas were very largely the reflection upon
38:40
Speaker 1: social and political thought of the vast revolution in material
38:45
Speaker 1: things that had been in progress for two hundred years.
38:49
Speaker 1: But for a long time they seemed to be having
38:52
Speaker 1: no more influence upon existing institutions than the writings of
38:56
Speaker 1: Rousseau and Voltaire seemed to have had at the time
39:00
Speaker 1: of the death of the latter. They were fermenting in
39:03
Speaker 1: men's minds, and it needed only just such social and
39:08
Speaker 1: political stresses as the coming of the atomic mechanisms brought
39:13
Speaker 1: about to thrust them forward abruptly into crude and startling realization.