A Dip Into the Future

A dip into the future by a scientific eye is always fascinating in its possibilities. Tesla, however, in one of the current magazines dips too far for equilibrium. We can accept many marvels. There will doubless be a time when the flying machine will be a fact; we may develop a fighting engine to fight our battles for us, making war merely a butchery of implements and of treaяure, and not of human lives; we have invented the first rudimentary "telautomatron," the machine of the future whose movemen's shall be controlled from a distance, responding with a nicety which suggests almost the conveyance of volition and nerve impulse over a slender thread of platinum wire; we may extract metal from ore and mold it electrically without fuel consumption; we may send a wireless telegraphic message around the globe, sterilize water with ozone, exterminate copper with aluminum, transmit electrical energy through the earth without a wire and draw energy from the sun; we may imitate the processes of vegetable and animal growth and make for ourselves foods from oxidized hydrogen. We may do all this, and this is a good halting place. We shall not invent "a self-acting engine capable of deriving energy from its own motion." From time to time we shall be deluded by the shouts of gentlenen like the late Mr. John Keeley of Philadelphia, but perpetual motion, the ancient fox-fire love of the credulons, will be as far off at the end of the twentieth century as the heirs of Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore are from their dividends. The man who will knock out the theory of the conservation of energy is too big for this little planet. He will have to be born somewhere else.