THE DREAMS OF SCIENCE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 197, 17 February 1912, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE DREAMS OF SCIENCE.

In another century and three-quarters the British coal mines will be so farexhausted that the people living then will stand face to face with famine and j misery. Such is the portentous warning 'of Sir WilKam Ramsay, the distinguished chemist. But by that time who knows what dreams of science may have been realised, ajid what new sources of energy may have been discovered to take the place of coal? Stephenson, it will be remembered, defined coal as "bottled sunshine"—bottled by Nature Millions of years ago to drive, among other things, the New Zealand railways in the twentieth century of the Christian era. Suppose we should hazard the audacious presumption that before some of to-day's schoolboys are old men liners will be driven across the Atlantic ;by stored electricity? A hundred years or more ago a dreamer predicted that ships would be propelled by steam from Britain to America. "Kidiculous!" exclaimed Dionysius Lardner, and many greater authorities. And it was not mere sciolists, but men of the highest | authority, who ridiculed with that scorn "which wisdom holds unlawful ever" the idea of electric light and still more of electric traction. Michael Faraday will be held in.the greatest esteem for his electrical discoveries, yet Faraday classed "electric light" with table-rapping and other similar absurdities. What would he have said of electric trains and tramways? He died on August 25, 1867, and in less than 30 years electric light was ; everywhere, and electric railways > were in existence. How this great man would have stood amazed to hear of electriv stations with turbine engines of 15,000 horse-power! How all, j)r,nearly all, of even the most far-seeing of his contemporaries would have condemned absolutely the thought that by electric etheral waves we should talk with people 2000 miles away without uttering a sound! Strangely enough, in one field of effort mankind has been sanguine even from early times—namely, in the belief that some day man would be able to fly. The sturdy faith was sound, though the facts seemed to be all against it. It stood for the ages as a beacon of presumption. Yet the steamers were right, though the fulfilment of their dreams came in a way they could not possibly anticipate, No man dreamt of a steamengine ere it was invented, and there was no talk of internal combustion engines before the days of gas and petrol. It is not rash to be very hopeful of what Science may accomplish; the presumption is to place a limit and say what she cannot do. Nature sells her secrets at a "price. Great laws like Newton's, instruments of knowledge like the Calculus, do not come unbidden. We must pay the price of research. That price we must pay for the storage of electricity. It may be a long and arduous research, but it will succeed. The inventive engineer is on the way to success; and not thus alone, but in may other unknown ways, the future will be taken care of, and Britain will not be face to face with famine and misery with the next two, nor'within the next twenty, centuries.