CIVILISATION’S ENERGY

Thames Star, Volume LVII, Issue 16212, 29 September 1924, Page 7

CIVILISATION’S ENERGY

“It would be interesting, but quite inconclusive,” says Mr Arthur D. Little in the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly, “to allow one’s self to speculate upon the progress which our civlisation is ultimately to make owing to the marvels that are resulting from the discovery of the Herzian waves. The sales of radio equipment in America reached a total of £30,000,000 last year, and are expected to double in 1924. The earth has become , a whispering gallery, ahd the ocean has lost its solitude. The farm is no longer isolated, and the newspapers, the theatres, and the pulpit have a new competitor.” It is possible now by Marconi’s netv marvel, the beam system, to direct an electric wave to any given area on the earth’s surface; to enable the human voice to be heard in any part of the globe. Marconi,, in this great discovery, has given a new power to mankind, the effect of which is only beginning to be realised. “Man,” adds the Atlantic contributor, “is no longer bound to earth. He had achieved a three-dimensional existence. Since 1920 the trans-continen- , tal mail service has covered nearly two million miles a year. It has handled in all nearly a million tonmiles of mail. In England, during the past two and a-half years, there was only one accident involving serious injury to a passenger for 5,000,000 miles flown. In a single month 2600 passengers have been carried by the London-Paris route. It is now possible to fly from Vienna to Paris in ten hours and from Strasburg to Constantinople in thirty hours.” And so we may, as Mr Augustine Birrel writes in More Obiter Dicta, “shove ourselves forward in fancy another hundred years. Bear in mind what must be the huge output of civilisation’s energies, think of the libraries it will compose, the pictures it will paint; consider its new buildings, its new inventions, its hurrying industries, and crowded paths. What production of the Victorian Age is so finished, so beautiful, and so strong a£ to be able successfully to meet and beat down the huge and swamping spring-tide of the days that are to come.”