LOOKING FORWARD

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVI, Issue 3444, 17 March 1932, Page 6

LOOKING FORWARD

THE NEXT HALF-CENTURY. What the next 50 years will bring, forth is a subject vital to every man and woman of to-day. None is better equipped to give us a glimpse into *the future than those now standing in the vanguard of present progress. whose public, position and practical experience in current affairs make them cautious.in prophecy. The opinions of a selection of such men, foremost in Great Britain and the United States of America will be briefly set out in this column during this and the next few weeks. The views of men in different walks of life have been sought, from the businessman and the scientist to the author and the churchman. The three men whose words are quoted below are all Americans.

Henry Ford, Industrialist. What will another half-century bring? No other can visualise with any degree of accuracy because human progress is full of surprises and strays from the course it seems to have selected. In the region ci material improvement there will be an entirely different world in less than 50 years hence —something so entirely different that it is not possible to visualise it. One important reason for this is the new freedom of life which people are to enjoy. The present day life is fettered and bound by all sorts of outworn systems that must pass away. We shall have a new money system, the effect of which will be to liberate ; human energies instead of restricting them. We shall have a saner social in which the insecurities of life will be greatly diminished and such an unnecessary and .unnatural

thing as unemployment shall utterly pass away.

To me it is clear that the future will put more stress on human values than on any other one thing. It is coming so fast now that I think it safe to say that in another ten years there will be more thought given to the rights of personality, a fact in itself that will amount to a social revolution. The abject spectacle of men being reduced to the humiliation of having to offer or having to accept public charity will be an ancient dream no longer a modern reality. In the years to come the waste of youth in useless preparation for lives they will never live and the waste of old age because we have not learned how to use the accumulated experience of old persons will no longer exist. Youth will be freed a'nd old age Will be made doubly useful in the time to come. The commotions of this present time are simply part of the preparatory pains heralding the birth of a truly new era.

Dr. R. A. Millikan, Scientist. Machine civilisation is not a menace, nor is man becoming a slave to machinery. The marvellous discoveries and inventions of the last 50 years relieved mankind for ever from the worst of the physical bondages with which all past civilisations enchained him. Because of machines, however, production has gone faster than consumption, thus resulting in unemployment. More and better schools are science's answer to the unemployment problem. Every penny invested in education returns more than double value. Every scientific advance finds ten times as many new, peaceful, constructive uses as it finds destructive ones.

Science will before the lapse of 50 years abolish war and knit the world together. The Great War was the last stand of militarism against the

advance of science. The steel that went into weapons will go into plough-shares, railroads, sewing machines and countless other things. Science has raised wages 50 per cent, in 40 years and reduced working time 20 per cent. And the proceeds of peace will continue at an accelerated rate.

For the past century men have been using the sunshine bottled up in the coal and oil of past ages and there is enough of this stored energy to serve our children. When the coal and oil are gone, science will find a way to utilise the energy of the sun. There is still another source of inexhaustible energy, which can be tapped without violating any known principles of psysics, or of thermodynamics or of the conservation of energy, namely, creative chemistry. If our children can find a way to combine hydrogen from sea water with helium, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, silicon, etc., enormous energies would be released. I have said and I believe that our grandchildren will be farther ahead of us than we are ahead of our grandfathers. It is also safe to predict that the religious life of the future will be wholesome, inspiring, reverent —completely divorced from all unreason, all superstition and all unwholesome emotionalism.

Professor A. L. Klein, Aeronaut. By 1982 long distance aeroplanes will be cruising in the stratosphere on scheduled speeds of more than 300 miles an hour. Since the air up there is too rare to be breathed by passengers the cabins will be airtight. They will carry their own supply of air, at a pressure of about 12 pounds to the square inch, which corresponds with the air on a mountain 10,000 feet high.

Such high speeds, however, will not be practical for short distances. Too much time would be wasted in rising to heights where high speeds are safe. Short-distance hops will be made at about twice the speed now deemed reliable. I am not sanguine about grass-hopper jumps between homes and offices. The trouble has nothing to do with planes, but with the air round buildings, where it is always gusty. There are airslides as well as landslides, and to try to land a small plane in an airslide is like trying to drive an automobile through a landslide.

I fell sure our grandchildren will be making transcontinental or transatlantic flights in ten hours, but they probably will have to do their shopping in something other than aeroplanes —perhaps in autogyros. Tops of buildings will be used for landings; but because of gusty air around buildings the landing roofs will have to be something like 1000 feet square, and this means that several buildings will have to be roofed together. Like buses and trucks there will always be a limit to the size of aeroplanes. Future aeroplanes will be all metal, mostly of the monoplane type, without tail or fuselage. If tails persist they will be carried- on outriggers. Even now aeroplanes are running to wings and losing their tails.