The Century's Greatest Achievement

The Philadelphia North American recently published a symposium on the question, “What achievement of the passing century has contributed most to the advancement and welfare of the human race?” Elihu Root, Secretary of War, named the discovery of the process of making Bessemer steel; Major-General Nelson A. Miles, the preservation of the American Republic; Horace Howard Furness, Sir Henry Irving and T. W. Cridler, of the State Department, our Civil War of 1861-65; Nikola Tesla, S. P. Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Senator Depew and Professor Harry Thurston Peck, the mastery of electrical forces; Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis, the laying of the Atlantic cable; Dr. Cyrus Edson, the discovery of the Roentgen ray; Alvey A. Adee, Second Assistant Secretary of State, the aseptic treatment used in surgery; Julian Hawthorne, the freeing of mankind from the yoke of spiritual authority; Henry George, Jr., the single tax movement; Rear-Admiral George W. Melville, the application of mechanics and physics to the comforts, needs and aspirations of man; Edward Atkinson, the invention of smokeless powder and the discovery of the work of bacteria, which, living and dying in leguminous plants, dissociate the nitrogen of the atmosphere and convert it first to the nutrition of the soil, next to the nutrition of the plant, and lastly to the nutrition of man.