The Press Monday, January 3, 1927. Wonders of Invention.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 18889, 3 January 1927, Page 8

The Press Monday, January 3, 1927. Wonders of Invention.

Rather inopportunely, at a season when most people's interest is confined to old-fashioned inventions like the Christmas cracker and old-fashioned pursuits like eating, drinking, and making merry, the cables have suddenly become noisy with announcements of newer and more serious things. Long-distance wireless telephony has with curious humour connected King Alfonso of Spain with Moscow, and is soon to make of England and America two gossips, whispering to each other across the Atlantic as if over a tea-cup. A man in Copenhagen has invented a helicopter, by mtans of which any sort of aeroplane to which it is attached may be brought to "land on the top of a "chimney." Professor Low, who not very long ago in a sort of scientific vision told the world what it was coming to, now not only promises that, within ten years " users of telephones "will see one another by television," at any range, but suggests the possibility of two benefits, strangely called " smelly-vision " and " tasty-vision." Mr Chesterton, in one of his poems, celebrates the Commercial Progress which enables financiers in England Whenever th«y like To water tho beer of a man 111 ICondyke; but even Mr Chesterton, two years ago, would have laughed at the notion of their being able not only to adulterate it, but to see it, and should the mad whim take them, to try its ethereal smell and ethereal taste. Early this month, too, "an amazing motor-car" is to be tested. It is driven by two engines of 500 horse-power each, ingeniously synchronised, and cooled by three radiators, it can go 200 miles an hour, and it seems equally likely to break every record and somebody's neck. All this is marvellous news, the actual achievements being in fact more marvellous than what is only promised; but, though the last twentyfive years have done something to shake a too complacent and easy t) iry of progress, this kind of evidence of scientific and mechanical advance is still commonly and dangerously counted as evidence of absolute progress. It is, of course, nothing of the sort. It is evidence of a conquest of possible means of human progress; but material instruments and abstract knowledge can be misused as well as used. It is a question whether a subtraction of the evils of misuse from the benefits of use does not leave us a very beggarly credit to boast of; Perhaps

modem life, which it is so easy for us to think of as a swift and efficient forward movement, is not unlike that of the wonderful motor-car j for the cable tells us of its unfortunate tendency "to spin round and round on " its own axis "