Great Inventions and DiscoveriesPiercy, Willis Duff
History
Great Inventions and Discoveries
Piercy, Willis Duff
Inventions
Tens of thousands of years ago, when the world was even then old,
primitive man came into existence. The first men lived in the branches
of trees or in their hollow trunks, and sometimes in caves. For food
they chased horses or caught fish from the streams along whose shores
they lived. If they had clothing, it was the skins of wild beasts. Life
was simple, slow, and crude. There were no cities, books, railroads,
clocks, newspapers, schools, churches, judges, teachers, automobiles,
or elections. Man lived with other animals and was little superior to
them. These primitive men are called cave-dwellers.
A resident of modern New York sits down to a breakfast gathered from
distant parts of the earth. He spreads out before him his daily
newspaper, which tells him what has happened during the last
twenty-four hours all over the world. Telegraph wires and ocean cables
have flashed these events across thousands of miles into the newspaper
offices and there great printing presses have recorded them upon paper.
After breakfast he gets into an electric street car or automobile and
is carried through miles of space in a very short time to a great steel
building hundreds of feet high. He steps into an electric elevator and
is whirled rapidly up to his office on the twentieth floor. The postman
brings a package of letters which fast-flying mail trains have brought
him during the night from far-away places. He reads them and then
speaks rapidly to a young woman who makes some crooked marks on paper.
After running her fingers rapidly over the keyboard of a little
machine, she hands him type-written replies to the letters he has
received. A boy brings him a little yellow envelope. In it he finds a
message from Seattle or London or Hong Kong or Buenos Ayres sent only a
few moments ago. He wishes to talk with a business associate in Boston
or St. Louis. Still sitting at his desk, he applies a small tube to his
ear and speaks to the man as distinctly and as instantaneously as if he
were in the next room. He finds it important to be in Chicago. After
luncheon, he boards a train equipped with the conveniences of his own
home, sleeps there comfortably, and flies through the thousand miles of
distance in time to have breakfast in Chicago the next morning.
What is the difference between the life of the cave-dweller and the
life of the modern New Yorker? We call it _civilization_. It is not at
one bound or at one thousand that we pass from the primitive cave to
New York City. Civilization is the accumulation of centuries of
achievement. It is builded, in the language of Isaiah, "line upon
line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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