The St. Lucie County tribune. (Fort Pierce, St. Lucie County, Fla.) 1905-1920, 1911-10-27
REMARKABLE
IS PROGRESS
The Wizard of Electricity Predicts
Airship for Future LOCOmOtiOn
THE EARLY INVENTIONS
SkeptiCism Which Formerly Greeted In
veLtions Giving Way TO Confidence
In Ability of Scientific Genius

Returning from Europe, where he
had been spending his first real vaca-
ton in twenty years, Thomas A. Edi-
son the other day made the prediction
that it is only question of time when
the airship will supplant the steamship
as swift, safe and practical medium
of trans-oceanic travel. AS rejecting
the marked change that has occurred
within recent years in the popular be-
lief in mans ability to accomplish the
seemingly impossible, it is significant
that no one dissents from the ''wiz-
ards" picture of our future means of
locOmOtiOn.
Yesterday such prophecy would
have been laughed to scOrn; today we
not only accept it as within the realm
of probability but look ahead to the
day when the big leviathan of the air
will replace not only the steamship,
but the railroad as well, for all forms
of transportation. Once skeptical of
everything that flew in the face of
tradition and threatened to upset the
old order of things, we now doubt moth
ing. For the well meaning clergymen
and church people who denounced Ben
Franklin from their pulpts as a usuper
of Divine prerogative, because he show
ed his fellow countrymen how. by means
of a lightning rod, they could protect
their lives and their property. we have
nothing but pity. Lightning was
means provided by the Almighty to
punish the sinful and wicked, these
good people thought, and anybody who
sought to rob it of its capacity to deal
death and injury to those meriting it,
and make it tractable to control, was
in league with the devil.
Thomas Jefferson tells in his memoirs
of one of his neighbors who was ''agin"
the public schools because "when ev-
eryone gets so that they can read and
write, nobody will want to work.
Bishop Berkely thanked God there was
not printing press in all Virginia, be-
cause printing presses printed mostly
lies and their business was to deceive
the people" Even so broad gagged
man as Ruskin declared the introduce
ton of railroads would ruin England by
driving the stages out of business and
killing the demand for horses. Peter
Cooper, builder of the first locomotive
in the United States, was made the
laughing stock of the whole country
side, because il ten mile race with
an old grey horse near Baltimore, his
boiler sprang leak and the horse won.
Robert Fulton was declared a fraud by
the boatmen Of the Hudson river who
doubted his ability to make the Cler-
mont navigate its waters by steam and
without the use of sails. Nrkwrght,
who invented the spinning frame which
revolutionized the weaving. business of
the world was mobbed, and jacquard,
whose loom is still the worlds stand
ard, came near being thrown into the
river by an angry crowd OF fabric work.
ers who feared his machine would de-
stroy their usefulness. 49,.
The invention of Elias Howe's sew
ing machine caused riot in New York
and a Pennsylvania womSn said of
Samuel Morses telegraph, which the
financiers of Wall street believed inn
practical and refused to finance: II
suppose no one can spank their brats
now without the whole world knowing
it," Alexander Graham Bells tele-
phone was said to be toy until the
Emperor Dom Pedro, finding il in cor
ner of the Centennial Exposition at
Philadelphia, pronounced it one Of the
marvels Of the age, Edison was
thought to be possessed of mild form
of dementia when he announced that by
injecting electricity into The carbon fiji
ament of lamp from which the air
had been removed he had discovered
the secret of what is today the worlds
universal lluminant. Patrick b. ID =
lany excited the same popular misgiv-
ings among the unsclentific with his
multiplex, by which six messages were
transmitted simultaneously over sin
gle wire and taxed our imagination to
the limit by his telepOst system of au-
tomato telegraphy by which 1000 words
minute are sent backward or fore
ward over one wire. Finally when
MarcOni, the beardless youth from
Bologna, showed US how without the
use of any wires at all, it was possible
to communicate over sea, we admitted
that there was nothing left to challenge
our credulity
Thus the world has moved on. Each
step has broadened our perspective,
strengthened our confidence and added
to our length of days, our pose, peace,
power and joy. No longer do we de-
nounce anyone or decry his invention.
Rather have we got to that point in
our evolution where we believe the APP
parently impossible is attainable and
that mankind, no longer circumscribed
by solar systems, cosmic phenomena
and once unsurmountable distractions is
now master not only of his own destiny
hut of that of generations yet unborn.