MASTERY OF THE MOTOR

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 55, 2 September 1937, Page 8

MASTERY OF THE MOTOR

Of recent years, with the immense development of invention, the question has frequently been raised whether man will remain master of the machine or whether he will become its slave. Professor Millias Culpin, of the London School of Tropical Medicine, openly declares, in an article in the "Practitioner," quoted in today's cable news, that one machine at least, the motor-car, is. mastering man. Accidents, he says, are due to the failure of human nature to cope with the progress of the machine it has created. The advance of the motor-car has been more rapid than the human adjustment to its new demands. The motor-car is still comparatively new to the world. Fifty years would cover, its whole career from its very genesis in the crude, harmless, horseless vehicles of Benz, Daimler, Panhard, and other inventors towards the end of the last century, to the present day. In this country the motor-car hardly goes back forty years. Not till the last decade did it become a problem and a portent. A single generation is a brief space in .time for human nature to change its habits and adjust itself to the new environment created by so powerful an engine of change as the motor-car. When cars ambled along at a pace not much above that of a gig behind a good trotter, the car and the road were still reasonably safe'for the people who used,; them. As the car became popular, the call rose for. better roads, and with better roads cars -■ multiplied their numbers and increased their speeds, until today there are thousands of vehicles, many times as fast as the first motor-car, thronging roads which have not advanced pari passu and are not fit for the highest speeds. It would seem (for the moment that the car has mastered the man who created it, but forces are- at work to secure adjustment everywhere in the world, both on the human and on the material side. The motor-car, like other machines in the past, will submit to control when jnan seriously tackles the problems it has engendered. . /