Northern Wisconsin advertiser. [volume] (Wabeno, Wis.) 1898-1925, 1903-06-18

the world. By this time next century
it will also be one of the most pOpu-
lous. Siberia, again, with many fertile
and salubrious tracts will certainly
have been fully utilized by this time
next century. But even when all the
regions available have been populated
and made use of the centers of civili-
cation will probably lie very much
where they lie now and here the con-
gested populations will have found
that they can no longer tolerate the
waste of p neglected ocean. AS we
push catward and ever outward from
the center of England the seaboard
will have to be utilized and extended.
I There is nothing to daunt the engi-
neers of hundred years hence in
the project of erection on the sea a
vast floating city, quite as salubrious
and convenient as the present cities of
terra firma and substantial enough to
resist storm and every motion of the
sea except the tides on which the city
will rise and fall.
A Next Century City.
There are great advantages in a
! city thus founded, as compared with
those we at present inhabit. There
will be no particular reason at first
for economy of space or for insalubri-
GUS overcrowding (since the ocean has
no landlord), and breadth would make
for stability as well as for convenience.
Traffic would employ an entirely new
vehicle, the skinner. 1t is thing be-
yond doubt that the ships of a hundred
years hence will not float in the sea,
but ride on its surface, thus evading
both the instability and resistance at
present SO troublesome to marine ell
gineers. AS soon as the necessity
arises for providing street traffic in
Ocean City-when ''the sea is in the
broad, the narrow streets, ebbing and
, flowing, and the salt seaweed clings
/ to the marble of her palaces" inven-
/ ton will meet the demand. Something
in the nature of breakwaters will pro-
vide against wave play and from an
unequaled exterior boulevard, and by
means of the anhydrator, an invention
which will long since have been called
| for by the requirements of other lo-
calities, the air of dwelling houses in
Ocean City will be wholesomely free
from damp.
For we shall certainly not have
failed to act upon our knowledge of
the fact that atmospheric damp is re-
| sponsible or the unhealthiness of GER
tain areas, and we shall have learned
by means of the anhydrator to pro-
vide any place with exactly the de-
grees of dryness necessary to perfect
healthfulness. Probably the appara-
tus will at the same time absorb all
carbonic acid and part of the nitrogen
at present in the air. so that the latter
will by the anhydrator be rendered
fresh and invigorating even in the
most crowded places.
In other ways, too, the sea will be
made use of. We shall get our salt
from it if we still eat salt, the process
of separation being, probably, electro
magnetic. But the chief gift of the
sea to the life of the future will be
the two gases of which water is ccnl-
posed-oxygen and hydrogen. Both
will be staple commodities hundred
years hence. Liquified oxygen will be
our sole disinfectant, for it greatly ex-
GELS all others. 1t will also replace the
poisonous, noisome and destructive
bleaching agents used today. Hydro
gen, the lightest of all gases, will be
another staple of commerce. 1t will
probably be the only fuel employed,
for it's combustion furnishes the great
est heat terrestrially known and its
flame is smokeless and yields no poi
sonous product. Moreover, the evap-
Grafton of liquid hydrogen produces,
by a sort of curious revenge, the
greatest available cold If anything in
the nature of balloons should survive
the century hydrogen will initiate
them. There are, moreover, vast rich
es as yet undreamed of below the sur
face of the ocean and beneath its
floor. There can be no question that
The needs of the world will have taught
us to tap them, and the sea, instead OF
living waste and wasteful as it does at
resent, will be one of our greatest
lsources of wealth a hundred years
hence.