The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1867-09-04

AchieVeme rents of the Past Generation.
WE reprinted yesterday from one of our ex-
changes an interesting summary of the events
of the second generation of the nineteenth CEN
tury. The retrospect certainly disOloses a
remarkable degree of progress in almost every
branch of human endeGvor and achievement.
We can, perhaps, better realize this if we
imagine how the worlds business would be
conducted were we suddenly to be deprived of
all that the generation just closed has given
US, and to be obliged to go back to the oondi-
ton of things as they were thirty years ago.
How would we get along without railroads,
steamships, telegraphs, sewing machines,
reapers and mowers, and the whole round of
appliances which science and invention have
either given as outright, or brought to perfec-
ton, during the past third of a century, We
could not do it at all. Take, for instance the
article of daily newspapers, and by no process
in vogue thirty years ago would it now be pos
sible for any daily journal, of large circula-
ton, to print sufficient number of copies to
supply its subscribers. The newspapers of
the present day are possible only because
invention has so wonderfully increased the
facilities for printing.
Take the means of transportation as they
existed thirty years ago, and the surplus pro-
ducts of the great West could not possibly be
got to market. Railroads are the modern
builders of States.
People had clothes to wear before sewing
machines were invented but if we were to go
back to hand-sewing now, we should find it
hard work to get along. So, too, the farmer
managed somehow to raise and gather crops
before the present improved agricultural ma
chinery was invented; but he did not in those
days number his single field of wheat or
corn by the hundred acres.
The past thirty years has witnessed vast
increase in the elements of production, in
the facilities of exchange and locomOtion, and
in the transmission and dissemination of in
telligence.
In some of these particulars we have pro-
badly reached, or closely approached, the
limit of possible human achievement. 1t is
difficult to conceive how the magnetic tele-
graph can ever be excelled in the rapidity of
transmitting intelligence. The details of the
invention may be more fully perfected, but
the essential idea will never be improved on.
Future improvements in printing must be
sought rather in the matter of type-setting
than in that of the printng-press 1t is pos
sible that some future invention may do away
with type-setting altogether.
We have reached the practicable limit of
speed in railroad travelling. So far as increased
rapidity of locomotion is concerned we must
probably seek for that, If we ever get it, in
some form of aerial navigation. The problem
in that direction is not necessarily hopeless
one, and some of the most brilliant achieve
ments of the future may be accomplished in
connection with it.
But while the practicable limit has been
reached in the rapidity of lOcomotOn by means
of railroads, the cost of freight transportation
is still far beyond what it ought to be. It
would doubtless be entirely within the limits
of possibility to construct and operate purely
freight railroad, from the Mississippi river to
the Atlantic seaboard, which should carry
freight at from One-quarter to one-half of the
rates now charged. This will probably be
done during the next thirty years. The
necessities of the country demand it, and it is
entirely practicable.
We shall also witness, undoubtedly, vast
extension and increase of the telegraph. 1t
will eventually be popularised so as almost to
supersede the mails That it has not already
done so is due to the shOrt-sightedness and
want of comprehension on the part of those
who have hitherto managed it. Wiser and
greater men will by-and-by take hold of it,
and then people will wonder that it was so
long nonOpolized by the few. Every part OF
the habitable globe will soon be reached by
the telegraph, 80 that the whole world, as far
as all important events are concerned, will
} live, as it were, simultaneous life.
! 1t hardly seems probable that the next
third of & century will witness as great inn
Q provements and as striking inventions as have
3 characterized that just past but it is impOs-
{ sibls TO forecast the action of the human