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

the first record of the first apparatus heavier than air that
ever maintained itself in the air by mechanical force. Across the
margin was written: 'Here we go up, up, up--from S. P. Langley,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington.'

The father watched the effect of this reassuring document upon
his son. 'Well?' he said.

'That,' said the schoolboy, after reflection, 'is only a model.'

'Model to-day, man to-morrow.'

The boy seemed divided in his allegiance. Then he decided for
what he believed quite firmly to be omniscience. 'But old
Broomie,' he said, 'he told all the boys in his class only
yesterday, "no man will ever fly." No one, he says, who has ever
shot grouse or pheasants on the wing would ever believe anything
of the sort....'

Yet that boy lived to fly across the Atlantic and edit his
father's reminiscences.

Section 7

At the close of the nineteenth century as a multitude of passages
in the literature of that time witness, it was thought that the
fact that man had at last had successful and profitable dealings
with the steam that scalded him and the electricity that flashed
and banged about the sky at him, was an amazing and perhaps a
culminating exercise of his intelligence and his intellectual
courage. The air of 'Nunc Dimittis' sounds in same of these
writings. 'The great things are discovered,' wrote Gerald Brown
in his summary of the nineteenth century. 'For us there remains
little but the working out of detail.' The spirit of the seeker
was still rare in the world; education was unskilled,
unstimulating, scholarly, and but little valued, and few people
even then could have realised that Science was still but the
flimsiest of trial sketches and discovery scarcely beginning. No
one seems to have been afraid of science and its possibilities.
Yet now where there had been but a score or so of seekers, there
were many thousands, and for one needle of speculation that had
been probing the curtain of appearances in 1800, there were now
hundreds. And already Chemistry, which had been content with her
atoms and molecules for the better part of a century, was
preparing herself for that vast next stride that was to
revolutionise the whole life of man from top to bottom.

One realises how crude was the science of that time when one
considers the case of the composition of air. This was
determined by that strange genius and recluse, that man of