Part XXI
4 Inventors who despair within a year because of non-appreciation of their work have something to consider in this thousand generation science and technology overall panorama, particularly of the mind over matter,—cosmic-to-abstract-to-objective sequences,—which rule each development.
5 They too also have something to learn who contemporarily dismiss inventions as being inconsequential because they don’t ‘‘take’’ immediately upon announcement.
6 And also there is warning here for those who though sincerely acknowledging merit in inventions whose strands have not yet been spliced into the industrial cables are as yet accustomed only to observing the long spans of non realization prior to 1850 and therefore dismiss the contemporary achievement as being ‘‘a thousand years ahead of its time’’ and thus fool themselves
7 as well as do injustice to the inventor.
8 But more importantly such commentators passively cultivate dangerously inadequate popular comprehension of its own total social stature and latent potential;—dangerous because;—when detonated the public falls prey to the hate traps politically set to divide it against itself.
9 Such commentators for instance if averagely well informed often justify their time lag laziness by thinking for instance of how it remained for Watt, in 1765, to catch the 137 year forward pass of the steam engine from Worcester, made practical by interim contiguous basic developments. They forget however why it is that they remember this item;—which was:—because Watt’s touchdown detonated the birth of active Industrialization within the old world stadium. It was a new kind of play.
10 Soon Watt’s primary work was followed by high pressure steam, mill applications, and successful propulsion of ships across harbors, and then out across the Atlantic.
11 Then steam was applied to the dry land ‘‘canal boat’’ the overland cargo vessel wheel borne on a way of steel.
12 However, the steam railway, though invented in 1831 was destined like all ‘‘end’’-products,—or consumer-contact inventions,—to wait for another forty years for the contiguous development of the less dramatic but absolutely essential full family of intermediary mechanical extensions the tools to make tools which had mostly to be invented outright and some to be brought up to date and all of them to be synchronized in production of and application to the major end product itself,—railroading;—and all of which involved a myraid of social and economic ways and means adjustments.
13 Thus railroading had to wait upon two score years of inventions of many shop and field tools and processes such as the turret lathe in ‘45 gear cutting machine in ‘53 Bessemer Steel in ‘59 milling machine in ‘61 dynamite and block-signals and the micrometer in ‘67 transcontinental trackage, air brakes and shield tunnelling in ‘69 automatic coupling of cars in ‘73 and the Civil War traffic and ‘‘defense’’ measures boom to break the inevitable social-economic ice jam to start the Industrial era off in the U.S.A, to a pace which was readable above the lowest marking on the world’s economic speedometer.
14 But from the initial acceleration it never slowed down.
15 Thus did steam finally provide the versatile means of placing inanimate energy under man’s mobile control where and when needed,—not just where waterfalls occurred,—to implement the milling for popular consumption of the centuries of planting of scientific contributions, in the mechanically extended brain cells of man, harvested only in laboratories, siloed in books, tools and instruments.
16 Thus do we witness over and again in the whole long mural that ideas first coming out of the blue pass by stages to Industrialization to sensorial objectivity;
17 after which the instrumental means and the end-products themselves employed or consumed by unit man individually,—all trend thereafter
18 again towards more with less,—ephemeralize,—
19 mobilize,—grow progressively and
20 increasingly exquisite in precision and orderliness,
21 faster,—less friction
22 more light
23 cosmic-to-abstract-to-objective- to-abstract-to—
24 back to the blue?