Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME 11
make of recording devices and of slow-motion photography.) Engineering
feats included new triumphs in bridge-building, the first great dikes and
dams along the Mississippi, and canals and tunnels, while among "odd and
curious developments" were listed the comptometer, the trackless trolley, the
new towering smoke stacks of industry, the extension fire ladder, and the
escalator and elevator, the latter developed to serve those "modern tall steel
skeleton fire-proof buildings, commonly called skyscrapers."
The marvels achieved presumed greater ones to come, and more than
one prophet looking into the new century envisioned a
a of years, made possible, as John Bates Clark
said in the Atlantic, by "omnipresent and nearly gratuitous electrical
energy!" In addition to coal and water .power, Clark optimistically predicted
that it would not be long before the waves and tides and even the
electric currents generated within the earth itself would be harnessed for
the production of cheap and virtually unlimited electric power. Industry,
commerce, and the home would be filled with automatic machines (". -
- we
touch a button and they do the rest," said Clark), putting in the hands of
every man a hundred silent servants, raising wages, dispelling poverty, and
stilling the unrest of the laboring classes.1'
H. G. Wells, with frequent glances at the American promise, agreed in
his "Experiment in Prophecy" in 1901 on the equalizing force of the electrical
century to come, saw homes and factories heated, ventilated, and operated
by electricity. But with this revolution, he predicted, would come a world
so closely linked and controlled by electrical conveniences and comrnunications
as to reduce all to a gray mass, to a virtually classless world of respectable
mechanics.
Even greater social and political changes than those resulting from
electricity, Wells thought, would come from the inevitable mass production
of commodities and the future development of the internal combustion engine.
Certain to come was a smooth-riding, powerful, and stenchiess gasoline
automobile and great networks of paved roads for it, making journeys of
300 miles in a day possible. Then motor trucks would replace the railroads,
and motor coaches supplant the horse cars and electric trolleys that ran out
to suburbia, where, as Wells said, the conforming gray mass of the future
lived.'2
tions of the Nineteenth Century (London: Geo. Routledge, 1876) and the survey of
the century's wonders in Sci. Am. 75, 50—96 (1896).
"John Bates Clark, "Recollections of the Twentieth Century," Atlantic, 89, 4 (1902).
Clark was professor of political economy at Columbia University from 1895 to 1923,
specializing in trusts and monopolies. See also George Sutherland, Twentieth Century
Inventions: A Forecast (New York & London: Longman's Green, 1901).
H. G. Wells, "Anticipation: an experiment in prophecy," North American Review,
vols. 172—173 (June—November 1901).