could be brought to practical utilisation. The thing, of course,
was discussed very much, more perhaps at the time of its
discovery than during the interval of technical adaptation, but
with very little realisation of the huge economic revolution that
impended. What chiefly impressed the journalists of 1933 was the
production of gold from bismuth and the realisation albeit upon
unprofitable lines of the alchemist's dreams; there was a
considerable amount of discussion and expectation in that more
intelligent section of the educated publics of the various
civilised countries which followed scientific development; but
for the most part the world went about its business-as the
inhabitants of those Swiss villages which live under the
perpetual threat of overhanging rocks and mountains go about
their business-just as though the possible was impossible, as
though the inevitable was postponed for ever because it was
delayed.
It was in 1953 that the first Holsten-Roberts engine brought
induced radio-activity into the sphere of industrial production,
and its first general use was to replace the steam-engine in
electrical generating stations. Hard upon the appearance of this
came the Dass-Tata engine-the invention of two among the
brilliant galaxy of Bengali inventors the modernisation of Indian
thought was producing at this time-which was used chiefly for
automobiles, aeroplanes, waterplanes, and such-like, mobile
purposes. The American Kemp engine, differing widely in principle
but equally practicable, and the Krupp-Erlanger came hard upon
the heels of this, and by the autumn of 1954 a gigantic
replacement of industrial methods and machinery was in progress
all about the habitable globe. Small wonder was this when the
cost, even of these earliest and clumsiest of atomic engines, is
compared with that of the power they superseded. Allowing for
lubrication the Dass-Tata engine, once it was started cost a
penny to run thirty-seven miles, and added only nine and quarter
pounds to the weight of the carriage it drove. It made the heavy
alcohol-driven automobile of the time ridiculous in appearance as
well as preposterously costly. For many years the price of coal
and every form of liquid fuel had been clambering to levels that
made even the revival of the draft horse seem a practicable
possibility, and now with the abrupt relaxation of this
stringency, the change in appearance of the traffic upon the
world's roads was instantaneous. In three years the frightful
armoured monsters that had hooted and smoked and thundered about
the world for four awful decades were swept away to the dealers
in old metal, and the highways thronged with light and clean and
shimmering shapes of silvered steel. At the same time a new
impetus was given to aviation by the relatively enormous power
for weight of the atomic engine, it was at last possible to add
Redmayne's ingenious helicopter ascent and descent engine to the
vertical propeller that had hitherto been the sole driving force
of the aeroplane without overweighting the machine, and men found
themselves possessed of an instrument of flight that could hover
or ascend or descend vertically and gently as well as rush wildly
through the air. The last dread of flying vanished. As the
journalists of the time phrased it, this was the epoch of the
Leap into the Air. The new atomic aeroplane became indeed a
mania; every one of means was frantic to possess a thing so
controllable, so secure and so free from the dust and danger of
the road, and in France alone in the year 1943 thirty thousand of
these new aeroplanes were manufactured and licensed, and soared
humming softly into the sky.
And with an equal speed atomic engines of various types invaded
industrialism. The railways paid enormous premiums for priority
in the delivery of atomic traction engines, atomic smelting was
embarked upon so eagerly as to lead to a number of disastrous
explosions due to inexperienced handling of the new power, and
the revolutionary cheapening of both materials and electricity
made the entire reconstruction of domestic buildings a matter
merely dependent upon a reorganisation of the methods of the
builder and the house-furnisher. Viewed from the side of the new
power and from the point of view of those who financed and
manufactured the new engines and material it required the age of
the Leap into the Air was one of astonishing prosperity.
Patent-holding companies were presently paying dividends of five
or six hundred per cent. and enormous fortunes were made and
fantastic wages earned by all who were concerned in the new
developments. This prosperity was not a little enhanced by the
fact that in both the Dass-Tata and Holsten-Roberts engines one
of the recoverable waste products was gold-the former
disintegrated dust of bismuth and the latter dust of lead-and
that this new supply of gold led quite naturally to a rise in
prices throughout the world.
This spectacle of feverish enterprise was productivity, this
crowding flight of happy and fortunate rich people-every great
city was as if a crawling ant-hill had suddenly taken wing-was
the bright side of the opening phase of the new epoch in human
history. Beneath that brightness was a gathering darkness, a
deepening dismay. If there was a vast development of production
there was also a huge destruction of values. These glaring
factories working night and day, these glittering new vehicles
swinging noiselessly along the roads, these flights of
dragon-flies that swooped and soared and circled in the air, were
indeed no more than the brightnesses of lamps and fires that
gleam out when the world sinks towards twilight and the night.
Between these high lights accumulated disaster, social
catastrophe. The coal mines were manifestly doomed to closure at
no very distant date, the vast amount of capital invested in oil
was becoming unsaleable, millions of coal miners, steel workers
upon the old lines, vast swarms of unskilled or under-skilled
labourers in innumerable occupations, were being flung out of
employment by the superior efficiency of the new machinery, the