, scattered through the
globe, labour to maintain it. Without them nothing would be left in
fifty years but ruins.

There is not even a thought, or an invention, which is not common
property, born of the past and the present. Thousands of inventors,
known and unknown, who have died in poverty, have co-operated in the
invention of each of these machines which embody the genius of man.

Thousands of writers, of poets, of scholars, have laboured to increase
knowledge, to dissipate error, and to create that atmosphere of
scientific thought, without which the marvels of our century could never
have appeared. And these thousands of philosophers, of poets, of
scholars, of inventors, have themselves been supported by the labour of
past centuries. They have been upheld and nourished through life, both
physically and mentally, by legions of workers and craftsmen of all
sorts. They have drawn their motive force from the environment.

The genius of a Seguin, a Mayer, a Grove, has certainly done more to
launch industry in new directions than all the capitalists in the world.
But men of genius are themselves the children of industry as well as of
science. Not until thousands of steam-engines had been working for years
before all eyes, constantly transforming heat into dynamic force, and
this force into sound, light, and electricity, could the insight of
genius proclaim the mechanical origin and the unity of the physical
forces. And if we, children of the nineteenth century, have at last
grasped this idea, if we know now how to apply it, it is again because
daily experience has prepared the way. The thinkers of the eighteenth
century saw and declared it, but the idea remained undeveloped, because
the eighteenth century had not grown up like ours, side by side with the
steam-engine. Imagine the decades that might have passed while we
remained in ignorance of this law, which has revolutionized modern
industry, had Watt not found at Soho skilled workmen to embody his ideas
in metal, bringing all the parts of his engine to perfection, so that
steam, pent in a complete mechanism, and rendered more docile than a
horse, more manageable than water, became at last the very soul of
modern industry.

Every machine has had the same history--a long record of sleepless
nights and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial
improvements discovered by several generations of nameless workers, who
have added to the original invention these