"H.G.Wells. The World Set Free" - читать интересную книгу автора

Gilbert before electricity stepped out of the cabinet of
scientific curiosities into the life of the common man.... Then
suddenly, in the half-century between 1880 and 1930, it ousted
the steam-engine and took over traction, it ousted every other
form of household heating, abolished distance with the perfected
wireless telephone and the telephotograph....

Section 6

And there was an extraordinary mental resistance to discovery and
invention for at least a hundred years after the scientific
revolution had begun. Each new thing made its way into practice
against a scepticism that amounted at times to hostility. One
writer upon these subjects gives a funny little domestic
conversation that happened, he says, in the year 1898, within ten
years, that is to say, of the time when the first aviators were
fairly on the wing. He tells us how he sat at his desk in his
study and conversed with his little boy.

His little boy was in profound trouble. He felt he had to speak
very seriously to his father, and as he was a kindly little boy
he did not want to do it too harshly.

This is what happened.

'I wish, Daddy,' he said, coming to his point, 'that you wouldn't
write all this stuff about flying. The chaps rot me.'

'Yes!' said his father.

'And old Broomie, the Head I mean, he rots me. Everybody rots
me.'

'But there is going to be flying--quite soon.'

The little boy was too well bred to say what he thought of that.
'Anyhow,' he said, 'I wish you wouldn't write about it.'

'You'll fly--lots of times--before you die,' the father assured
him.

The little boy looked unhappy.

The father hesitated. Then he opened a drawer and took out a
blurred and under-developed photograph. 'Come and look at this,'
he said.

The little boy came round to him. The photograph showed a stream
and a meadow beyond, and some trees, and in the air a black,
pencil-like object with flat wings on either side of it. It was