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.... 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 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.