Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales: "The fiddle and the bow," "The paradise of fools," "Visions and dreams"Taylor, Robt. L. (Robert Love)
General
Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales: "The fiddle and the bow," "The paradise of fools," "Visions and dreams"
Taylor, Robt. L. (Robert Love)
Speeches, addresses, etc.
A dreamer saw the imprisoned vapor throw open the lid of a teakettle,
and lo! a steam engine came puffing from his brain. And now many a huge
monster of Corliss, beautiful as a vision of Archimedes and smooth in
movement as a wheeling planet, sends its thrill of life and power
through mammoth plants of humming machinery. The fiery courser of the
steel-bound track shoots over hill and plain, like a mid-night meteor
through the fields of heaven, outstripping the wind.
A dreamer carried about in his brain a great Leviathan. It was launched
upon the billows, and like some collossal swan the palatial steamship
now sweeps in majesty through the blue wastes of old ocean.
Six hundred years before Christ, some old Greek discovered electricity
by rubbing a piece of amber, and unable to grasp the mystery, he called
it soul. His discovery slept for more than two thousand years until it
awoke in the dreams of Galvani, and Volta, and Benjamin Franklin. In the
morning of the nineteenth century the sculptor and scientist, Morse, saw
in his dreams, phantom lightnings leap across continents, and oceans,
and felt the pulse of thunder beat as it came bounding over threads of
iron that girdled the earth. In each throb he read a human thought. The
electric telegraph emerged from his brain, like Minerva from the brow of
Jove, and the world received a fresh baptism of light and glory.
In a few more years we will step over the threshold of the twentieth
century. What greater wonders will the dreamers yet unfold? It may be
that another magician, greater even than Edison, the "Wizzard of Menloe
Park," will rise up and coax the very laws of nature into easy compliance
with his unheard-of dreams. I think he will construct an electric
railway in the form of a huge tube, and call it the "electro-scoot,"
and passengers will enter it in New York and touch a button and arrive
in San Francisco two hours before they started! I think a new discovery
will be made by which the young man of the future may stand at his
"kiss-o-phone" in New York, and kiss his sweetheart in Chicago with all
the delightful sensations of the "aforesaid and the same." I think some
Liebig will reduce foods to their last analyses, and by an ultimate
concentration of their elements, will enable the man of the future to
carry a year's provisions in his vest pocket. The sucking dude will
store his rations in the head of his cane, and the commissary department
of a whole army will consist of a mule and a pair of saddlebags. A train
load of cabbage will be transported in a sardine box, and a thousand fat
Texas cattle in an oyster can. Power will be condensed from a forty
horse engine to a quart cup. Wagons will roll by the power in their
axles, and the cushions of our buggies will cover the force that propels
them. The armies of the future will fight with chain lightning, and the
battlefield will become so hot and unhealthy that,
"He who fights and runs away
Will never fight another day."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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