The Republican. [volume] (Oakland, Md.) 1877-current, 1926-01-07
WHAT WOULD THE PIONEER
SAY TO ALL OF THIS?
First Quarter of Twentieth Cen
fury The Worlds Greatest
Inventive Age,


ages crouched in forest.
Around the edge of the forest,
slowly, laboriously, came an emf
grant train, four or five crudely fash
Toned bowls of wagons, drawn by slow
moving, sweating oxen.
A few swift arrows whistled thru
the air. The struggle was unequal.
Man in his native element had con-
quered man, the invader, again.
But mans mind proved swiftcr than
the swiftest and straightest Of the
feathered darts of death of the Indi-
ans. The years passed and the invad-
err defeated the native. Standing 90
day on the same spot where that mi
gratory train met its fate, looking
back over the century between, the
man of today rules as matter of all
he surveys. He has bent nature to
his bidding.
Especially during the quarter CEN
fury coming to a close with 1925 has
man, the invader, beaten down the ell
ements into inventions that would
send man, the native, screaming in
flight. The inventions of the past %
years and their practical development,
overshadow all the inventions of the
entire race for hundreds of years pre-
Before the dawn of the twentieth
century the knife of medical science,
efficient though it was, went in with
only a general knowledge of mans
ailment. But now its path is defined.
The x-ray was discovered by William
K. Roentgen in 1895.
In a Paris laboratory, in 1898. two
scientists worked to give the world a
wonderful new chemical element, ra-
dunn, an element that is still 50 rare
that it is being passed around the
world from hospital to hospital where
it is used in the treatment of cancer,
goiter and other diseases. Its value
has been put at S3,000,000 an ounce.
The scientists were Prof. Pierre Curie
and his wife, Marie Sklodowska Curie.
Where the red mans smoke sent its
signal into the sky now stands huge
tower, taller than the highest tree of
the old forests. From the tower man
sends his messages to his fellows in
invisible smoke that flashes across
continents and oceans in the twinkling
of an eye.
Twenty-Five years ago the world
laughed at Guglielmo Marconi and a
little group of men who believed in
radio. Now in many home along the
route of the old schooner train, fam
lily sits around the box that brings
stories of the worlds work and songs
of the world at play.
Twenty-Five years! The world was
indeed amused when it read of Darius
Green and his flying machine, but
more amused at the Wright brothers
for following Darius example. To fly
was to die. Wings to carry man thru
the air? Well, hardly. But rs years
have sped-and man flies!
Man flies, so does time. On the spot
where the first immigrant train met
fate, red school house was reared.
twenty-five years ago bright-faced
boy risked his life to get to that
school house. His way led across a
road that was hardly more than a
path, with a narrow footbridge here
and there across some frozen stream.
The boy returns today to spend the
New Year with the family. He goes
whizzing in his automobile along a
highly polished pavement, roars over
a culvert where the old bridge stood
and past the barn that Dobbin long
ago gave up to a new fre-breatlling
beast that rolls.
High above the barn another engine
huns. The boy of 25 years ago would
have run away at the sight of this
monstrous fly. Now he takes out his
watch, perhaps with the thought that
the airmail's right on time again.
Steam and gasoline and electricity
have changed the world. Hero, of
Alexandria, played with a steam toy
in 120 B. c., but it was 100 years
before practicable steam engine
was invented. A little more than 100
years ago Fulton applied the steam to
a boat and it moved. World-old ira
ditions were shot to smithereens when
Fulton's crude craft padded along in
the Hudson.
McCormick's reaper is nearly 100
years old, but it took the genius of
application of the twentieth century
to roll reaper and thresher into one
and hitch the tractor to it to do in a
few hours work that once took long
days.
Gutenberg invented printing press
in 1850. The twentieth century press