Some Possible Discoveries

The present time is harvest home for the prophets. The happy speculator
in future sits on the piled-up wain, singing "I told you so," with the
submarine and the flying machine and the Marconigram and the North Pole
successfully achieved. In the tumult of realisations it perhaps escapes
attention that the prophetic output of new hopes is by no means keeping
pace with the crop of consummations. The present trend of scientific
development is not nearly so obvious as it was a score of years ago; its
promises lack the elementary breadth of that simpler time. Once you have
flown, you have flown. Once you have steamed about under water, you have
steamed about under water. There seem no more big things of that kind
available--so that I almost regret the precipitance of Commander Peary
and Captain Amundsen. No one expects to go beyond that atmosphere for
some centuries at least; all the elements are now invaded. Conceivably
man may presently contrive some sort of earthworm apparatus, so that he
could go through the rocks prospecting very much as an earthworm goes
through the soil, excavating in front and dumping behind, but, to put it
moderately, there are considerable difficulties. And I doubt the
imaginative effect. On the whole, I think material science has got
samples now of all its crops at this level, and that what lies before it
in the coming years is chiefly to work them out in detail and realise
them on the larger scale. No doubt science will still yield all sorts
of big surprising effects, but nothing, I think, to equal the dramatic
novelty, the demonstration of man having got to something altogether new
and strange, of Montgolfier, or the Wright Brothers, of Columbus, or the
Polar conquest. There remains, of course, the tapping of atomic energy,
but I give two hundred years yet before that....

So far, then, as mechanical science goes I am inclined to think the
coming period will be, from the point of view of the common man, almost
without sensational interest. There will be an immense amount of
enrichment and filling-in, but of the sort that does not get prominently
into the daily papers. At every point there will be economies and
simplifications of method, discoveries of new artificial substances with
new capabilities, and of new methods of utilising power. There will be a
progressive change in the apparatus and quality of human life--the sort
of alteration of the percentages that causes no intellectual shock.
Electric heating, for example, will become practicable in our houses,
and then cheaper, and at last so cheap and good that nobody will burn
coal any more. Little electric contrivances will dispense with menial
service in more and more directions. The builder will introduce new,
more