ing of turning the mill by fire.
I made many fruitless experiments on the subject."

Boulton wrote Franklin, February 22, 1766, in London, about this, and
sent a model he had made. Franklin replies a month later, apologising
for the delay on account of "the hurry and anxiety I have been engaged
in with our American affairs."[1]

Tamer of lightning and tamer of steam, Franklin and Watt--one of the
new, the other of the old branch of our English-speaking
race--co-operating in enlarging the powers of man and pushing forward
the chariot of progress--fit subject, this, for the sculptor and
painter!

How much further the steam engine is to be the hand-maid of electricity
cannot be told, for it seems impossible to set limits to the future
conquests of the latter, which is probably destined to perform miracles
un-dreamt of to-day, perhaps coupled in some unthought-of way, with
radium, the youngest sprite of the weird, uncanny tribe of mysterious
agents. Uranium, the supposed basis of the latest discovery, Radium, has
only one-millionth part of the heat of the latter. The slow-moving earth
takes twenty-four hours to turn upon its axis. Radium covers an equal
distance while we pronounce its name. One and one-quarter seconds, and
twenty-five thousand miles are traversed. Puck promises to put his
"girdle round the earth in forty minutes." Radium would pass the fairy
girdlist in the spin round sixteen hundred times. Thus truth, as it is
being evolved in our day, becomes stranger than the wildest imaginings
of fiction. Our century seems on the threshold of discoveries and
advances, not less revolutionary, perhaps more so, than those that have
sprung from steam and electricity. "Canst thou send lightnings to say
'Lo, here I am'?" silenced man. It was so obviously beyond his power
until last century. Now he smiles as he reads the question. Is Tyndal's
prophecy to be verified that "the potency of all things is yet to be
found in matter"?

We may be sure the searching, restless brains of Franklin and Watt would
have been meditating upon strange things these days if they were now
alive.

Boulton is entitled to rank, so far as the writer knows, as the first
man in the world worthy to wear Carlyle's now somewhat familiar title,
"Captain of Industry" for he was in his day foremost in the industrial
field, and before that, industrial organisations had not developed far
enough to create or require captains, in Carlyle's sense.

Roebuck