Section 1

THE history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power.  Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal.  From the outset of his terrestrial career we find him supplementing the natural strength and bodily weapons of a beast by the heat of burning and the rough implement of stone.  So he passed beyond the ape.  From that he expands.  Presently he added to himself the power of the horse and the ox, he borrowed the carrying strength of water and the driving force of the wind, he quickened his fire by blowing, and his simple tools, pointed first with copper and then with iron, increased and varied and became more elaborate and efficient.  He sheltered his heat in houses and made his way easier by paths and roads.  He complicated his social relationships and increased his efficiency by the division of labour.  He began to store up knowledge.  Contrivance followed contrivance, each making it possible for a man to do more.  Always down the lengthening record, save for a set-back ever and again, he is doing more....  A quarter of a million years ago the utmost man was a savage, a being scarcely articulate, sheltering in holes in the rocks, armed with a rough-hewn flint or a fire-pointed stick, naked, living in small family groups, killed by some younger man so soon as his first virile activity declined.  Over most of the great wildernesses of earth you would have sought him in vain; only in a few temperate and sub-tropical river valleys would you have found the squatting lairs of his little herds, a male, a few females, a child or so.

He knew no future then, no kind of life except the life he led.  He fled the cave-bear over the rocks full of iron ore and the promise of sword and spear; he froze to death upon a ledge of coal; he drank water muddy with the clay that would one day make cups of porcelain; he chewed the ear of wild wheat he had plucked and gazed with a dim speculation in his eyes at the birds that soared beyond his reach.  Or suddenly he became aware of the scent of another male and rose up roaring, his roars the formless precursors of moral admonitions.  For he was a great individualist, that original, he suffered none other than himself.

So through the long generations, this heavy precursor, this ancestor of all of us, fought and bred and perished, changing almost imperceptibly.

Yet he changed.  That keen chisel of necessity which sharpened the tiger's claw age by age and fined down the clumsy Orchippus to the swift grace of the horse, was at work upon him--is at work upon him still.  The clumsier and more stupidly fierce among him were killed soonest and oftenest; the finer hand, the quicker eye, the bigger brain, the better balanced body prevailed; age by age, the implements were a little better made, the man a little more delicately adjusted to his possibilities.  He became more social; his herd grew larger; no longer did each man kill or drive out his growing sons; a system of taboos made them tolerable to him, and they revered him alive and soon even after he was dead, and were his allies against the beasts and the rest of mankind.  (But they were forbidden to touch the women of the tribe, they had to go out and capture women for themselves, and each son fled from his stepmother and hid from her lest the anger of the Old Man should be roused.  All the world over, even to this day, these ancient inevitable taboos can be traced.) And now instead of caves came huts and hovels, and the fire was better tended and there were wrappings and garments; and so aided, the creature spread into colder climates, carrying food with him, storing food--until sometimes the neglected grass-seed sprouted again and gave a first hint of agriculture.

And already there were the beginnings of leisure and thought.

Man began to think.  There were times when he was fed, when his lusts and his fears were all appeased, when the sun shone upon the squatting-place and dim stirrings of speculation lit his eyes.  He scratched upon a bone and found resemblance and pursued it and began pictorial art, moulded the soft, warm clay of the river brink between his fingers, and found a pleasure in its patternings and repetitions, shaped it into the form of vessels, and found that it would hold water.  He watched the streaming river, and wondered from what bountiful breast this incessant water came; he blinked at the sun and dreamt that perhaps he might snare it and spear it as it went down to its resting-place amidst the distant hills.  Then he was roused to convey to his brother that once indeed he had done so--at least that some one had done so--he mixed that perhaps with another dream almost as daring, that one day a mammoth had been beset; and therewith began fiction--pointing a way to achievement--and the august prophetic procession of tales.

For scores and hundreds of centuries, for myriads of generations that life of our fathers went on.  From the beginning to the ripening of that phase of human life, from the first clumsy eolith of rudely chipped flint to the first implements of polished stone, was two or three thousand centuries, ten or fifteen thousand generations.  So slowly, by human standards, did humanity gather itself together out of the dim intimations of the beast.  And that first glimmering of speculation, that first story of achievement, that story-teller bright-eyed and flushed under his matted hair, gesticulating to his gaping, incredulous listener, gripping his wrist to keep him attentive, was the most marvellous beginning this world has ever seen.  It doomed the mammoths, and it began the setting of that snare that shall catch the sun.

That dream was but a moment in a man's life, whose proper business it seemed was to get food and kill his fellows and beget after the manner of all that belongs to the fellowship of the beasts.  About him, hidden from him by the thinnest of veils, were the untouched sources of Power, whose magnitude we scarcely do more than suspect even to-day, Power that could make his every conceivable dream come real.  But the feet of the race were in the way of it, though he died blindly unknowing.

At last, in the generous levels of warm river valleys, where food is abundant and life very easy, the emerging human overcoming his earlier jealousies, becoming, as necessity persecuted him less urgently, more social and tolerant and amenable, achieved a larger community.  There began a division of labour, certain of the older men specialised in knowledge and direction, a strong man took the fatherly leadership in war, and priest and king began to develop their roles in the opening drama of man's history.  The priest's solicitude was seed-time and harvest and fertility, and the king ruled peace and war.  In a hundred river valleys about the warm, temperate zone of the earth there were already towns and temples, a score of thousand years ago.  They flourished unrecorded, ignoring the past and unsuspicious of the future, for as yet writing had still to begin.

Very slowly did man increase his demand upon the illimitable wealth of Power that offered itself on every hand to him.  He tamed certain animals, he developed his primordially haphazard agriculture into a ritual, he added first one metal to his resources and then another, until he had copper and tin and iron and lead and gold and silver to supplement his stone, he hewed and carved wood, made pottery, paddled down his river until he came to the sea, discovered the wheel and made the first roads.  But his chief activity for a hundred centuries and more, was the subjugation of himself and others to larger and larger societies.  The history of man is not simply the conquest of external power; it is first the conquest of those distrusts and fiercenesses, that self-concentration and intensity of animalism, that tie his hands from taking his inheritance.  The ape in us still resents association.  From the dawn of the age of polished stone to the achievement of the Peace of the World, man's dealings were chiefly with himself and his fellow man, trading, bargaining, law-making, propitiating, enslaving, conquering, exterminating, and every little increment in Power, he turned at once and always turns to the purposes of this confused elaborate struggle to socialise.  To incorporate and comprehend his fellow men into a community of purpose became the last and greatest of his instincts.  Already before the last polished phase of the stone age was over he had become a political animal.  He made astonishingly far-reaching discoveries within himself, first of counting and then of writing and making records, and with that his town communities began to stretch out to dominion; in the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and the great Chinese rivers, the first empires and the first written laws had their beginnings.  Men specialised for fighting and rule as soldiers and knights.  Later, as ships grew seaworthy, the Mediterranean which had been a barrier became a highway, and at last out of a tangle of pirate polities came the great struggle of Carthage and Rome.  The history of Europe is the history of the victory and breaking up of the Roman Empire.  Every ascendant monarch in Europe up to the last, aped Caesar and called himself Kaiser or Tsar or Imperator or Kasir-i-Hind.  Measured by the duration of human life it is a vast space of time between that first dynasty in Egypt and the coming of the aeroplane, but by the scale that looks back to the makers of the eoliths, it is all of it a story of yesterday.

Now during this period of two hundred centuries or more, this period of the warring states, while men's minds were chiefly preoccupied by politics and mutual aggression, their progress in the acquirement of external Power was slow--rapid in comparison with the progress of the old stone age, but slow in comparison with this new age of systematic discovery in which we live.  They did not very greatly alter the weapons and tactics of warfare, the methods of agriculture, seamanship, their knowledge of the habitable globe, or the devices and utensils of domestic life between the days of the early Egyptians and the days when Christopher Columbus was a child.  Of course, there were inventions and changes, but there were also retrogressions; things were found out and then forgotten again; it was, on the whole, a progress, but it contained no steps; the peasant life was the same, there were already priests and lawyers and town craftsmen and territorial lords and rulers doctors, wise women, soldiers and sailors in Egypt and China and Assyria and south-eastern Europe at the beginning of that period, and they were doing much the same things and living much the same life as they were in Europe in A.D. 1500.  The English excavators of the year A.D. 1900 could delve into the remains of Babylon and Egypt and disinter legal documents, domestic accounts, and family correspondence that they could read with the completest sympathy.  There were great religious and moral changes throughout the period, empires and republics replaced one another, Italy tried a vast experiment in slavery, and indeed slavery was tried again and again and failed and failed and was still to be tested again and rejected again in the New World; Christianity and Mohammedanism swept away a thousand more specialised cults, but essentially these were progressive adaptations of mankind to material conditions that must have seemed fixed for ever.  The idea of revolutionary changes in the material conditions of life would have been entirely strange to human thought through all that time.

Yet the dreamer, the story-teller, was there still, waiting for his opportunity amidst the busy preoccupations, the comings and goings, the wars and processions, the castle building and cathedral building, the arts and loves, the small diplomacies and incurable feuds, the crusades and trading journeys of the middle ages.  He no longer speculated with the untrammelled freedom of the stone-age savage; authoritative explanations of everything barred his path; but he speculated with a better brain, sat idle and gazed at circling stars in the sky and mused upon the coin and crystal in his hand.  Whenever there was a certain leisure for thought throughout these times, then men were to be found dissatisfied with the appearances of things, dissatisfied with the assurances of orthodox belief, uneasy with a sense of unread symbols in the world about them, questioning the finality of scholastic wisdom.  Through all the ages of history there were men to whom this whisper had come of hidden things about them.  They could no longer lead ordinary lives nor content themselves with the common things of this world once they had heard this voice.  And mostly they believed not only that all this world was as it were a painted curtain before things unguessed at, but that these secrets were Power.  Hitherto Power had come to men by chance, but now there were these seekers seeking, seeking among rare and curious and perplexing objects, sometimes finding some odd utilisable thing, sometimes deceiving themselves with fancied discovery, sometimes pretending to find.  The world of every day laughed at these eccentric beings, or found them annoying and ill-treated them, or was seized with fear and made saints and sorcerers and warlocks of them, or with covetousness and entertained them hopefully; but for the greater part heeded them not at all.  Yet they were of the blood of him who had first dreamt of attacking the mammoth; every one of them was of his blood and descent; and the thing they sought, all unwittingly, was the snare that will some day catch the sun.

Such a man was that Leonardo da Vinci, who went about the court of Sforza in Milan in a state of dignified abstraction.  His common-place books are full of prophetic subtlety and ingenious anticipations of the methods of the early aviators.  Durer was his parallel and Roger Bacon--whom the Franciscans silenced--of his kindred.  Such a man again in an earlier city was Hero of Alexandria, who knew of the power of steam nineteen hundred years before it was first brought into use.  And earlier still was Archimedes of Syracuse, and still earlier the legendary Daedalus of Cnossos.  All up and down the record of history whenever there was a little leisure from war and brutality the seekers appeared.  And half the alchemists were of their tribe.

When Roger Bacon blew up his first batch of gunpowder one might have supposed that men would have gone at once to the explosive engine.  But they could see nothing of the sort.  They were not yet beginning to think of seeing things; their metallurgy was all too poor to make such engines even had they thought of them.  For a time they could not make instruments sound enough to stand this new force even for so rough a purpose as hurling a missile.  Their first guns had barrels of coopered timber, and the world waited for more than five hundred years before the explosive engine came.

Even when the seekers found, it was at first a long journey before the world could use their findings for any but the roughest, most obvious purposes.  If man in general was not still as absolutely blind to the unconquered energies about him as his paleolithic precursor, he was at best purblind.

The latent energy of coal and the power of steam waited long on the verge of discovery, before they began to influence human lives.

There were no doubt many such devices as Hero's toys devised and forgotten, time after time, in courts and palaces, but it needed that coal should be mined and burning with plenty of iron at hand before it dawned upon men that here was something more than a curiosity.  And it is to be remarked that the first recorded suggestion for the use of steam was in war; there is an Elizabethan pamphlet in which it is proposed to fire shot out of corked iron bottles full of heated water.  The mining of coal for fuel, the smelting of iron upon a larger scale than men had ever done before, the steam pumping engine, the steam-engine and the steam-boat, followed one another in an order that had a kind of logical necessity.  It is the most interesting and instructive chapter in the history of the human intelligence, the history of steam from its beginning as a fact in human consciousness to the perfection of the great turbine engines that preceded the utilisation of intra-molecular power.  Nearly every human being must have seen steam, seen it incuriously for many thousands of years; the women in particular were always heating water, boiling it, seeing it boil away, seeing the lids of vessels dance with its fury; millions of people at different times must have watched steam pitching rocks out of volcanoes like cricket balls and blowing pumice into foam, and yet you may search the whole human record through, letters, books, inscriptions, pictures, for any glimmer of a realisation that here was force, here was strength to borrow and use....  Then suddenly man woke up to it, the railways spread like a network over the globe, the ever enlarging iron steamships began their staggering fight against wind and wave.

Steam was the first-comer in the new powers, it was the beginning of the Age of Energy that was to close the long history of the Warring States.

But for a long time men did not realise the importance of this novelty.  They would not recognise, they were not able to recognise that anything fundamental had happened to their immemorial necessities.  They called the steam-engine the 'iron horse' and pretended that they had made the most partial of substitutions.  Steam machinery and factory production were visibly revolutionising the conditions of industrial production, population was streaming steadily in from the country-side and concentrating in hitherto unthought-of masses about a few city centres, food was coming to them over enormous distances upon a scale that made the one sole precedent, the corn ships of imperial Rome, a petty incident; and a huge migration of peoples between Europe and Western Asia and America was in Progress, and--nobody seems to have realised that something new had come into human life, a strange swirl different altogether from any previous circling and mutation, a swirl like the swirl when at last the lock gates begin to open after a long phase of accumulating water and eddying inactivity....

The sober Englishman at the close of the nineteenth century could sit at his breakfast-table, decide between tea from Ceylon or coffee from Brazil, devour an egg from France with some Danish ham, or eat a New Zealand chop, wind up his breakfast with a West Indian banana, glance at the latest telegrams from all the world, scrutinise the prices current of his geographically distributed investments in South Africa, Japan, and Egypt, and tell the two children he had begotten (in the place of his father's eight) that he thought the world changed very little.  They must play cricket, keep their hair cut, go to the old school he had gone to, shirk the lessons he had shirked, learn a few scraps of Horace and Virgil and Homer for the confusion of cads, and all would be well with them....

Electricity, though it was perhaps the earlier of the two to be studied, invaded the common life of men a few decades after the exploitation of steam.  To electricity also, in spite of its provocative nearness all about him, mankind had been utterly blind for incalculable ages.  Could anything be more emphatic than the appeal of electricity for attention?  It thundered at man's ears, it signalled to him in blinding flashes, occasionally it killed him, and he could not see it as a thing that concerned him enough to merit study.  It came into the house with the cat on any dry day and crackled insinuatingly whenever he stroked her fur.  It rotted his metals when he put them together....  There is no single record that any one questioned why the cat's fur crackles or why hair is so unruly to brush on a frosty day, before the sixteenth century.  For endless years man seems to have done his very successful best not to think about it at all; until this new spirit of the Seeker turned itself to these things.

How often things must have been seen and dismissed as unimportant, before the speculative eye and the moment of vision came!  It was Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth's court physician, who first puzzled his brains with rubbed amber and bits of glass and silk and shellac, and so began the quickening of the human mind to the existence of this universal presence.  And even then the science of electricity remained a mere little group of curious facts for nearly two hundred years, connected perhaps with magnetism--a mere guess that--perhaps with the lightning.  Frogs' legs must have hung by copper hooks from iron railings and twitched upon countless occasions before Galvani saw them.  Except for the lightning conductor, it was 250 years after 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....

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 mystery, that disembowelled intelligence, Henry Cavendish, towards the end of the eighteenth century.  So far as he was concerned the work was admirably done.  He separated all the known ingredients of the air with a precision altogether remarkable; he even put it upon record that he had some doubt about the purity of the nitrogen.  For more than a hundred years his determination was repeated by chemists all the world over, his apparatus was treasured in London, he became, as they used to say, 'classic,' and always, at every one of the innumerable repetitions of his experiment, that sly element argon was hiding among the nitrogen (and with a little helium and traces of other substances, and indeed all the hints that might have led to the new departures of the twentieth-century chemistry), and every time it slipped unobserved through the professorial fingers that repeated his procedure.

Is it any wonder then with this margin of inaccuracy, that up to the very dawn of the twentieth-century scientific discovery was still rather a procession of happy accidents than an orderly conquest of nature?

Yet the spirit of seeking was spreading steadily through the world.  Even the schoolmaster could not check it.  For the mere handful who grew up to feel wonder and curiosity about the secrets of nature in the nineteenth century, there were now, at the beginning of the twentieth, myriads escaping from the limitations of intellectual routine and the habitual life, in Europe, in America, North and South, in Japan, in China, and all about the world.

It was in 1910 that the parents of young Holsten, who was to be called by a whole generation of scientific men, 'the greatest of European chemists,' were staying in a villa near Santo Domenico, between Fiesole and Florence.  He was then only fifteen, but he was already distinguished as a mathematician and possessed by a savage appetite to understand.  He had been particularly attracted by the mystery of phosphorescence and its apparent unrelatedness to every other source of light.  He was to tell afterwards in his reminiscences how he watched the fireflies drifting and glowing among the dark trees in the garden of the villa under the warm blue night sky of Italy; how he caught and kept them in cages, dissected them, first studying the general anatomy of insects very elaborately, and how he began to experiment with the effect of various gases and varying temperature upon their light.  Then the chance present of a little scientific toy invented by Sir William Crookes, a toy called the spinthariscope, on which radium particles impinge upon sulphide of zinc and make it luminous, induced him to associate the two sets of phenomena.  It was a happy association for his inquiries.  It was a rare and fortunate thing, too, that any one with the mathematical gift should have been taken by these curiosities.

And while the boy Holsten was mooning over his fireflies at Fiesole, a certain professor of physics named Rufus was giving a course of afternoon lectures upon Radium and Radio-Activity in Edinburgh.  They were lectures that had attracted a very considerable amount of attention.  He gave them in a small lecture-theatre that had become more and more congested as his course proceeded.  At his concluding discussion it was crowded right up to the ceiling at the back, and there people were standing, standing without any sense of fatigue, so fascinating did they find his suggestions....

'And so,' said the professor, 'we see that this Radium, which seemed at first a fantastic exception, a mad inversion of all that was most established and fundamental in the constitution of matter, is really at one with the rest of the elements.  It does noticeably and forcibly what probably all the other elements are doing with an imperceptible slowness.  It is like the single voice crying aloud that betrays the silent breathing multitude in the darkness.  Radium is an element that is breaking up and flying to pieces.  But perhaps all elements are doing that at less perceptible rates.  Uranium certainly is; thorium--the stuff of this incandescent gas mantle--certainly is; actinium.  I feel that we are but beginning the list.  And we know now that the atom, that once we thought hard and impenetrable, and indivisible and final and--lifeless--lifeless, is really a reservoir of immense energy.  That is the most wonderful thing about all this work.  A little while ago we thought of the atoms as we thought of bricks, as solid building material, as substantial matter, as unit masses of lifeless stuff, and behold! these bricks are boxes, treasure boxes, boxes full of the intensest force.  This little bottle contains about a pint of uranium oxide; that is to say, about fourteen ounces of the element uranium.  It is worth about a pound.  And in this bottle, ladies and gentlemen, in the atoms in this bottle there slumbers at least as much energy as we could get by burning a hundred and sixty tons of coal.  If at a word, in one instant I could suddenly release that energy here and now it would blow us and everything about us to fragments; if I could turn it into the machinery that lights this city, it could keep Edinburgh brightly lit for a week.  But at present no man knows, no man has an inkling of how this little lump of stuff can be made to hasten the release of its store.  It does release it, as a burn trickles.  Slowly the uranium changes into radium, the radium changes into a gas called the radium emanation, and that again to what we call radium A, and so the process goes on, giving out energy at every stage, until at last we reach the last stage of all, which is, so far as we can tell at present, lead.  But we cannot hasten it.'....

The professor went on after a little pause.  'Why is the change gradual?' he asked.  'Why does only a minute fraction of the radium disintegrate in any particular second?  Why does it dole itself out so slowly and so exactly?  Why does not all the uranium change to radium and all the radium change to the next lowest thing at once?  Why this decay by driblets; why not a decay en masse?...  Suppose presently we find it is possible to quicken that decay?'....

The professor lifted his forefinger.

'Given that knowledge,' he said, 'mark what we should be able to do!  We should not only be able to use this uranium and thorium; not only should we have a source of power so potent that a man might carry in his hand the energy to light a city for a year, fight a fleet of battleships, or drive one of our giant liners across the Atlantic; but we should also have a clue that would enable us at last to quicken the process of disintegration in all the other elements, where decay is still so slow as to escape our finest measurements.  Every scrap of solid matter in the world would become an available reservoir of concentrated force.  Do you realise, ladies and gentlemen, what these things would mean for us?....

'It would mean a change in human conditions that I can only compare to the discovery of fire, that first discovery that lifted man above the brute.  We stand to-day towards radio-activity as our ancestor stood towards fire before he had learnt to make it.  He knew it then only as a strange thing utterly beyond his control, a flare on the crest of the volcano, a red destruction that poured through the forest.  So it is that we know radio-activity to-day.  This--this is the dawn of a new day in human living.  At the climax of that civilisation which had its beginning in the hammered flint and the fire-stick of the savage, just when it is becoming apparent that our ever-increasing needs cannot be borne indefinitely by our present sources of energy, we discover suddenly the possibility of an entirely new civilisation.  The energy we need for our very existence, and with which Nature supplies us still so grudgingly, is in reality locked up in inconceivable quantities all about us.  We cannot pick that lock at present, but--'

He paused.  His voice sank so that everybody strained a little to hear him.

'--we will.'

He put up that lean finger again, his solitary gesture.

'And then,' he said....

'Then that perpetual struggle for existence, that perpetual struggle to live on the bare surplus of Nature's energies will cease to be the lot of Man.  Man will step from the pinnacle of this civilisation to the beginning of the next.  I have no eloquence, ladies and gentlemen, to express the vision of man's material destiny that opens out before me.  I see the desert continents transformed, the poles no longer wildernesses of ice, the whole world once more Eden.  I see the power of man reach out among the stars....'

He stopped abruptly with a catching of the breath that many an actor or orator might have envied.

The lecture was over, the audience hung silent for a few seconds, sighed, became audible, stirred, fluttered, prepared for dispersal.  More light was turned on and what had been a dim mass of figures became a bright confusion of movement.  Some of the people signalled to friends, some crowded down towards the platform to examine the lecturer's apparatus and make notes of his diagrams....

Section 1

The problem which was already being mooted by such scientific men as Ramsay, Rutherford, and Soddy, in the very beginning of the twentieth century, the problem of inducing radio-activity in the heavier elements and so tapping the internal energy of atoms, was solved by a wonderful combination of induction, intuition, and luck by Holsten so soon as the year 1933.  From the first detection of radio-activity to its first subjugation to human purpose measured little more than a quarter of a century.  For twenty years after that, indeed, minor difficulties prevented any striking practical application of his success, but the essential thing was done, this new boundary in the march of human progress was crossed, in that year.  He set up atomic disintegration in a minute particle of bismuth; it exploded with great violence into a heavy gas of extreme radio-activity, which disintegrated in its turn in the course of seven days, and it was only after another year's work that he was able to show practically that the last result of this rapid release of energy was gold.  But the thing was done--at the cost of a blistered chest and an injured finger, and from the moment when the invisible speck of bismuth flashed into riving and rending energy, Holsten knew that he had opened a way for mankind, however narrow and dark it might still be, to worlds of limitless power.  He recorded as much in the strange diary biography he left the world, a diary that was up to that particular moment a mass of speculations and calculations, and which suddenly became for a space an amazingly minute and human record of sensations and emotions that all humanity might understand.

He gives, in broken phrases and often single words, it is true, but none the less vividly for that, a record of the twenty-four hours following the demonstration of the correctness of his intricate tracery of computations and guesses.  'I thought I should not sleep,' he writes--the words he omitted are supplied in brackets--(on account of) 'pain in (the) hand and chest and (the) wonder of what I had done....  Slept like a child.'

He felt strange and disconcerted the next morning; he had nothing to do, he was living alone in apartments in Bloomsbury, and he decided to go up to Hampstead Heath, which he had known when he was a little boy as a breezy playground....

Young Holsten's face was white.  He walked with that uneasy affectation of ease that marks an overstrained nervous system and an under-exercised body.  He hesitated at the White Stone Pond whether to go to the left of it or the right, and again at the fork of the roads.  He kept shifting his stick in his hand, and every now and then he would get in the way of people on the footpath or be jostled by them because of the uncertainty of his movements.  He felt, he confesses, 'inadequate to ordinary existence.'  He seemed to himself to be something inhuman and mischievous.  All the people about him looked fairly prosperous, fairly happy, fairly well adapted to the lives they had to lead--a week of work and a Sunday of best clothes and mild promenading--and he had launched something that would disorganise the entire fabric that held their contentments and ambitions and satisfactions together.  'Felt like an imbecile who has presented a box full of loaded revolvers to a Creche,' he notes....

...He had a vague idea that night that he ought not to publish his results, that they were premature, that some secret association of wise men should take care of his work and hand it on from generation to generation until the world was riper for its practical application.  He felt that nobody in all the thousands of people he passed had really awakened to the fact of change, they trusted the world for what it was, not to alter too rapidly, to respect their trusts, their assurances, their habits, their little accustomed traffics and hard-won positions....

His intelligence struggled against this mood and struggled for a time in vain.  He reassured himself against the invasion of this disconcerting idea that he was something strange and inhuman, a loose wanderer from the flock returning with evil gifts from his sustained unnatural excursions amidst the darknesses and phosphorescences beneath the fair surfaces of life.  Man had not been always thus; the instincts and desires of the little home, the little plot, was not all his nature; also he was an adventurer, an experimenter, an unresting curiosity, an insatiable desire.  For a few thousand generations indeed he had tilled the earth and followed the seasons, saying his prayers, grinding his corn and trampling the October winepress, yet not for so long but that he was still full of restless stirrings.

'If there have been home and routine and the field,' thought Holsten, 'there have also been wonder and the sea.'

He turned his head and looked up over the back of the seat at the great hotels above him, full of softly shaded lights and the glow and colour and stir of feasting.  Might his gift to mankind mean simply more of that?...

He got up and walked out of the garden, surveyed a passing tram-car, laden with warm light, against the deep blues of evening, dripping and trailing long skirts of shining reflection; he crossed the Embankment and stood for a time watching the dark river and turning ever and again to the lit buildings and bridges.  His mind began to scheme conceivable replacements of all those clustering arrangements....

'It has begun,' he writes in the diary in which these things are recorded.  'It is not for me to reach out to consequences I cannot foresee.  I am a part, not a whole; I am a little instrument in the armoury of Change.  If I were to burn all these papers, before a score of years had passed, some other man would be doing this...

Holsten, before he died, was destined to see atomic energy dominating every other source of power, but for some years yet a vast network of difficulties in detail and application kept the new discovery from any effective invasion of ordinary life.  The path from the laboratory to the workshop is sometimes a tortuous one; electro-magnetic radiations were known and demonstrated for twenty years before Marconi made them practically available, and in the same way it was twenty years before induced radio-activity could be brought to practical utilisation.  The thing, of course, was discussed very much, more perhaps at the time of its discovery than during the interval of technical adaptation, but with very little realisation of the huge economic revolution that impended.  What chiefly impressed the journalists of 1933 was the production of gold from bismuth and the realisation albeit upon unprofitable lines of the alchemist's dreams; there was a considerable amount of discussion and expectation in that more intelligent section of the educated publics of the various civilised countries which followed scientific development; but for the most part the world went about its business--as the inhabitants of those Swiss villages which live under the perpetual threat of overhanging rocks and mountains go about their business--just as though the possible was impossible, as though the inevitable was postponed for ever because it was delayed.

It was in 1953 that the first Holsten-Roberts engine brought induced radio-activity into the sphere of industrial production, and its first general use was to replace the steam-engine in electrical generating stations.  Hard upon the appearance of this came the Dass-Tata engine--the invention of two among the brilliant galaxy of Bengali inventors the modernisation of Indian thought was producing at this time--which was used chiefly for automobiles, aeroplanes, waterplanes, and such-like, mobile purposes.  The American Kemp engine, differing widely in principle but equally practicable, and the Krupp-Erlanger came hard upon the heels of this, and by the autumn of 1954 a gigantic replacement of industrial methods and machinery was in progress all about the habitable globe.  Small wonder was this when the cost, even of these earliest and clumsiest of atomic engines, is compared with that of the power they superseded.  Allowing for lubrication the Dass-Tata engine, once it was started cost a penny to run thirty-seven miles, and added only nine and quarter pounds to the weight of the carriage it drove.  It made the heavy alcohol-driven automobile of the time ridiculous in appearance as well as preposterously costly.  For many years the price of coal and every form of liquid fuel had been clambering to levels that made even the revival of the draft horse seem a practicable possibility, and now with the abrupt relaxation of this stringency, the change in appearance of the traffic upon the world's roads was instantaneous.  In three years the frightful armoured monsters that had hooted and smoked and thundered about the world for four awful decades were swept away to the dealers in old metal, and the highways thronged with light and clean and shimmering shapes of silvered steel.  At the same time a new impetus was given to aviation by the relatively enormous power for weight of the atomic engine, it was at last possible to add Redmayne's ingenious helicopter ascent and descent engine to the vertical propeller that had hitherto been the sole driving force of the aeroplane without overweighting the machine, and men found themselves possessed of an instrument of flight that could hover or ascend or descend vertically and gently as well as rush wildly through the air.  The last dread of flying vanished.  As the journalists of the time phrased it, this was the epoch of the Leap into the Air.  The new atomic aeroplane became indeed a mania; every one of means was frantic to possess a thing so controllable, so secure and so free from the dust and danger of the road, and in France alone in the year 1943 thirty thousand of these new aeroplanes were manufactured and licensed, and soared humming softly into the sky.

And with an equal speed atomic engines of various types invaded industrialism.  The railways paid enormous premiums for priority in the delivery of atomic traction engines, atomic smelting was embarked upon so eagerly as to lead to a number of disastrous explosions due to inexperienced handling of the new power, and the revolutionary cheapening of both materials and electricity made the entire reconstruction of domestic buildings a matter merely dependent upon a reorganisation of the methods of the builder and the house-furnisher.  Viewed from the side of the new power and from the point of view of those who financed and manufactured the new engines and material it required the age of the Leap into the Air was one of astonishing prosperity.  Patent-holding companies were presently paying dividends of five or six hundred per cent.  and enormous fortunes were made and fantastic wages earned by all who were concerned in the new developments.  This prosperity was not a little enhanced by the fact that in both the Dass-Tata and Holsten-Roberts engines one of the recoverable waste products was gold--the former disintegrated dust of bismuth and the latter dust of lead--and that this new supply of gold led quite naturally to a rise in prices throughout the world.

This spectacle of feverish enterprise was productivity, this crowding flight of happy and fortunate rich people--every great city was as if a crawling ant-hill had suddenly taken wing--was the bright side of the opening phase of the new epoch in human history.  Beneath that brightness was a gathering darkness, a deepening dismay.  If there was a vast development of production there was also a huge destruction of values.  These glaring factories working night and day, these glittering new vehicles swinging noiselessly along the roads, these flights of dragon-flies that swooped and soared and circled in the air, were indeed no more than the brightnesses of lamps and fires that gleam out when the world sinks towards twilight and the night.  Between these high lights accumulated disaster, social catastrophe.  The coal mines were manifestly doomed to closure at no very distant date, the vast amount of capital invested in oil was becoming unsaleable, millions of coal miners, steel workers upon the old lines, vast swarms of unskilled or under-skilled labourers in innumerable occupations, were being flung out of employment by the superior efficiency of the new machinery, the rapid fall in the cost of transit was destroying high land values at every centre of population, the value of existing house property had become problematical, gold was undergoing headlong depreciation, all the securities upon which the credit of the world rested were slipping and sliding, banks were tottering, the stock exchanges were scenes of feverish panic;--this was the reverse of the spectacle, these were the black and monstrous under-consequences of the Leap into the Air.

There is a story of a demented London stockbroker running out into Threadneedle Street and tearing off his clothes as he ran.  'The Steel Trust is scrapping the whole of its plant,' he shouted.  'The State Railways are going to scrap all their engines.  Everything's going to be scrapped--everything.  Come and scrap the mint, you fellows, come and scrap the mint!'

In the year 1955 the suicide rate for the United States of America quadrupled any previous record.  There was an enormous increase also in violent crime throughout the world.  The thing had come upon an unprepared humanity; it seemed as though human society was to be smashed by its own magnificent gains.

For there had been no foresight of these things.  There had been no attempt anywhere even to compute the probable dislocations this flood of inexpensive energy would produce in human affairs.  The world in these days was not really governed at all, in the sense in which government came to be understood in subsequent years.  Government was a treaty, not a design; it was forensic, conservative, disputatious, unseeing, unthinking, uncreative; throughout the world, except where the vestiges of absolutism still sheltered the court favourite and the trusted servant, it was in the hands of the predominant caste of lawyers, who had an enormous advantage in being the only trained caste.  Their professional education and every circumstance in the manipulation of the fantastically naive electoral methods by which they clambered to power, conspired to keep them contemptuous of facts, conscientiously unimaginative, alert to claim and seize advantages and suspicious of every generosity.  Government was an obstructive business of energetic fractions, progress went on outside of and in spite of public activities, and legislation was the last crippling recognition of needs so clamorous and imperative and facts so aggressively established as to invade even the dingy seclusions of the judges and threaten the very existence of the otherwise inattentive political machine.

The world was so little governed that with the very coming of plenty, in the full tide of an incalculable abundance, when everything necessary to satisfy human needs and everything necessary to realise such will and purpose as existed then in human hearts was already at hand, one has still to tell of hardship, famine, anger, confusion, conflict, and incoherent suffering.  There was no scheme for the distribution of this vast new wealth that had come at last within the reach of men; there was no clear conception that any such distribution was possible.  As one attempts a comprehensive view of those opening years of the new age, as one measures it against the latent achievement that later years have demonstrated, one begins to measure the blindness, the narrowness, the insensate unimaginative individualism of the pre-atomic time.  Under this tremendous dawn of power and freedom, under a sky ablaze with promise, in the very presence of science standing like some bountiful goddess over all the squat darknesses of human life, holding patiently in her strong arms, until men chose to take them, security, plenty, the solution of riddles, the key of the bravest adventures, in her very presence, and with the earnest of her gifts in court, the world was to witness such things as the squalid spectacle of ... patent litigation....

Section 2

...She roused herself with a start.  She became aware that the night outside was no longer still.  That there was an excitement down below on the bridge and a running in the street and a flickering of searchlights among the clouds from some high place away beyond the Trocadero.  And then the excitement came surging up past her and invaded the hall within.

One of the sentinels from the terrace stood at the upper end of the room, gesticulating and shouting something.

And all the world had changed.  A kind of throbbing.  She couldn't understand.  It was as if all the water-pipes and concealed machinery and cables of the ways beneath, were beating--as pulses beat.  And about her blew something like a wind--a wind that was dismay.

Her eyes went to the face of the Marshal as a frightened child might look towards its mother.

 He was still serene.  He was frowning slightly, she thought, but that was natural enough, for the Earl of Delhi, with one hand gauntly gesticulating, had taken him by the arm and was all too manifestly disposed to drag him towards the great door that opened on the terrace.  And Viard was hurrying towards the huge windows and doing so in the strangest of attitudes, bent forward and with eyes upturned.

Something up there?

And then it was as if thunder broke overhead.

The sound struck her like a blow.  She crouched together against the masonry and looked up.  She saw three black shapes swooping down through the torn clouds, and from a point a little below two of them, there had already started curling trails of red....

Everything else in her being was paralysed, she hung through moments that seemed infinities, watching those red missiles whirl down towards her.

She felt torn out of the world.  There was nothing else in the world but a crimson-purple glare and sound, deafening, all-embracing, continuing sound.  Every other light had gone out about her and against this glare hung slanting walls, pirouetting pillars, projecting fragments of cornices, and a disorderly flight of huge angular sheets of glass.  She had an impression of a great ball of crimson-purple fire like a maddened living thing that seemed to be whirling about very rapidly amidst a chaos of falling masonry, that seemed to be attacking the earth furiously, that seemed to be burrowing into it like a blazing rabbit . . .

She had all the sensations of waking up out of a dream.

She found she was lying face downward on a bank of mould and that a little rivulet of hot water was running over one foot.  She tried to raise herself and found her leg was very painful.  She was not clear whether it was night or day nor where she was; she made a second effort, wincing and groaning, and turned over and got into a sitting position and looked about her.

Everything seemed very silent.  She was, in fact, in the midst of a vast uproar, but she did not realise this because her hearing had been destroyed.

At first she could not join on what she saw to any previous experience.

She seemed to be in a strange world, a soundless, ruinous world, a world of heaped broken things.  And it was lit--and somehow this was more familiar to her mind than any other fact about her--by a flickering, purplish-crimson light.  Then close to her, rising above a confusion of debris, she recognised the Trocadero; it was changed, something had gone from it, but its outline was unmistakable.  It stood out against a streaming, whirling uprush of red-lit steam.  And with that she recalled Paris and the Seine and the warm, overcast evening and the beautiful, luminous organisation of the War Control....

She drew herself a little way up the slope of earth on which she lay, and examined her surroundings with an increasing understanding....

The earth on which she was lying projected like a cape into the river.  Quite close to her was a brimming lake of dammed-up water, from which these warm rivulets and torrents were trickling.  Wisps of vapour came into circling existence a foot or so from its mirror-surface.  Near at hand and reflected exactly in the water was the upper part of a familiar-looking stone pillar.  On the side of her away from the water the heaped ruins rose steeply in a confused slope up to a glaring crest.  Above and reflecting this glare towered pillowed masses of steam rolling swiftly upward to the zenith.  It was from this crest that the livid glow that lit the world about her proceeded, and slowly her mind connected this mound with the vanished buildings of the War Control.

'Mais!' she whispered, and remained with staring eyes quite motionless for a time, crouching close to the warm earth.

Then presently this dim, broken human thing began to look about it again.  She began to feel the need of fellowship.  She wanted to question, wanted to speak, wanted to relate her experience.  And her foot hurt her atrociously.  There ought to be an ambulance.  A little gust of querulous criticisms blew across her mind.  This surely was a disaster! Always after a disaster there should be ambulances and helpers moving about....

She craned her head.  There was something there.  But everything was so still!

'Monsieur!' she cried.  Her ears, she noted, felt queer, and she began to suspect that all was not well with them.

It was terribly lonely in this chaotic strangeness, and perhaps this man--if it was a man, for it was difficult to see--might for all his stillness be merely insensible.  He might have been stunned....

The leaping glare beyond sent a ray into his corner and for a moment every little detail was distinct.  It was Marshal Dubois.  He was lying against a huge slab of the war map.  To it there stuck and from it there dangled little wooden objects, the symbols of infantry and cavalry and guns, as they were disposed upon the frontier.  He did not seem to be aware of this at his back, he had an effect of inattention, not indifferent attention, but as if he were thinking....

She could not see the eyes beneath his shaggy brows, but it was evident he frowned.  He frowned slightly, he had an air of not wanting to be disturbed.  His face still bore that expression of assured confidence, that conviction that if things were left to him France might obey in security....

She did not cry out to him again, but she crept a little nearer.  A strange surmise made her eyes dilate.  With a painful wrench she pulled herself up so that she could see completely over the intervening lumps of smashed-up masonry.  Her hand touched something wet, and after one convulsive movement she became rigid.

It was not a whole man there; it was a piece of a man, the head and shoulders of a man that trailed down into a ragged darkness and a pool of shining black....

Never before in the history of warfare had there been a continuing explosive; indeed, up to the middle of the twentieth century the only explosives known were combustibles whose explosiveness was due entirely to their instantaneousness; and these atomic bombs which science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men who used them.  Those used by the Allies were lumps of pure Carolinum, painted on the outside with unoxidised cydonator inducive enclosed hermetically in a case of membranium.  A little celluloid stud between the handles by which the bomb was lifted was arranged so as to be easily torn off and admit air to the inducive, which at once became active and set up radio-activity in the outer layer of the Carolinum sphere.  This liberated fresh inducive, and so in a few minutes the whole bomb was a blazing continual explosion.  The Central European bombs were the same, except that they were larger and had a more complicated arrangement for animating the inducive.

Always before in the development of warfare the shells and rockets fired had been but momentarily explosive, they had gone off in an instant once for all, and if there was nothing living or valuable within reach of the concussion and the flying fragments then they were spent and over.  But Carolinum, which belonged to the beta group of Hyslop's so-called 'suspended degenerator' elements, once its degenerative process had been induced, continued a furious radiation of energy and nothing could arrest it.  Of all Hyslop's artificial elements, Carolinum was the most heavily stored with energy and the most dangerous to make and handle.  To this day it remains the most potent degenerator known.  What the earlier twentieth-century chemists called its half period was seventeen days; that is to say, it poured out half of the huge store of energy in its great molecules in the space of seventeen days, the next seventeen days' emission was a half of that first period's outpouring, and so on.  As with all radio-active substances this Carolinum, though every seventeen days its power is halved, though constantly it diminishes towards the imperceptible, is never entirely exhausted, and to this day the battle-fields and bomb fields of that frantic time in human history are sprinkled with radiant matter, and so centres of inconvenient rays.

What happened when the celluloid stud was opened was that the inducive oxidised and became active.  Then the surface of the Carolinum began to degenerate.  This degeneration passed only slowly into the substance of the bomb.  A moment or so after its explosion began it was still mainly an inert sphere exploding superficially, a big, inanimate nucleus wrapped in flame and thunder.  Those that were thrown from aeroplanes fell in this state, they reached the ground still mainly solid, and, melting soil and rock in their progress, bored into the earth.  There, as more and more of the Carolinum became active, the bomb spread itself out into a monstrous cavern of fiery energy at the base of what became very speedily a miniature active volcano.  The Carolinum, unable to disperse, freely drove into and mixed up with a boiling confusion of molten soil and superheated steam, and so remained spinning furiously and maintaining an eruption that lasted for years or months or weeks according to the size of the bomb employed and the chances of its dispersal.  Once launched, the bomb was absolutely unapproachable and uncontrollable until its forces were nearly exhausted, and from the crater that burst open above it, puffs of heavy incandescent vapour and fragments of viciously punitive rock and mud, saturated with Carolinum, and each a centre of scorching and blistering energy, were flung high and far.

Such was the crowning triumph of military science, the ultimate explosive that was to give the 'decisive touch' to war....

A recent historical writer has described the world of that time as one that 'believed in established words and was invincibly blind to the obvious in things.' Certainly it seems now that nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible.  And as certainly they did not see it.  They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands.  Yet the broad facts must have glared upon any intelligent mind.  All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the amount of energy that men were able to command was continually increasing.  Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict a blow, the power to destroy, was continually increasing.  There was no increase whatever in the ability to escape.  Every sort of passive defence, armour, fortifications, and so forth, was being outmastered by this tremendous increase on the destructive side.  Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it; it was revolutionising the problems of police and internal rule.  Before the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city.  These facts were before the minds of everybody; the children in the streets knew them.  And yet the world still, as the Americans used to phrase it, 'fooled around' with the paraphernalia and pretensions of war.

It is only by realising this profound, this fantastic divorce between the scientific and intellectual movement on the one hand, and the world of the lawyer-politician on the other, that the men of a later time can hope to understand this preposterous state of affairs.  Social organisation was still in the barbaric stage.  There were already great numbers of actively intelligent men and much private and commercial civilisation, but the community, as a whole, was aimless, untrained and unorganised to the pitch of imbecility.  Collective civilisation, the 'Modern State,' was still in the womb of the future....

 Section 1

For the whole world was flaring then into a monstrous phase of destruction.  Power after Power about the armed globe sought to anticipate attack by aggression.  They went to war in a delirium of panic, in order to use their bombs first.  China and Japan had assailed Russia and destroyed Moscow, the United States had attacked Japan, India was in anarchistic revolt with Delhi a pit of fire spouting death and flame; the redoubtable King of the Balkans was mobilising.  It must have seemed plain at last to every one in those days that the world was slipping headlong to anarchy.  By the spring of 1959 from nearly two hundred centres, and every week added to their number, roared the unquenchable crimson conflagrations of the atomic bombs, the flimsy fabric of the world's credit had vanished, industry was completely disorganised and every city, every thickly populated area was starving or trembled on the verge of starvation.  Most of the capital cities of the world were burning; millions of people had already perished, and over great areas government was at an end.  Humanity has been compared by one contemporary writer to a sleeper who handles matches in his sleep and wakes to find himself in flames.

For many months it was an open question whether there was to be found throughout all the race the will and intelligence to face these new conditions and make even an attempt to arrest the downfall of the social order.  For a time the war spirit defeated every effort to rally the forces of preservation and construction.  Leblanc seemed to be protesting against earthquakes, and as likely to find a spirit of reason in the crater of Etna.  Even though the shattered official governments now clamoured for peace, bands of irreconcilables and invincible patriots, usurpers, adventurers, and political desperadoes, were everywhere in possession of the simple apparatus for the disengagement of atomic energy and the initiation of new centres of destruction.  The stuff exercised an irresistible fascination upon a certain type of mind.  Why should any one give in while he can still destroy his enemies?  Surrender?  While there is still a chance of blowing them to dust?  The power of destruction which had once been the ultimate privilege of government was now the only power left in the world--and it was everywhere.  There were few thoughtful men during that phase of blazing waste who did not pass through such moods of despair as Barnet describes, and declare with him:  'This is the end....'