The World Set Free

Section 6

And there was an extraordinary mental resistance to discovery and invention for at least a hundred years after the scientific revolution had begun.  Each new thing made its way into practice against a scepticism that amounted at times to hostility.  One writer upon these subjects gives a funny little domestic conversation that happened, he says, in the year 1898, within ten years, that is to say, of the time when the first aviators were fairly on the wing.  He tells us how he sat at his desk in his study and conversed with his little boy.

His little boy was in profound trouble.  He felt he had to speak very seriously to his father, and as he was a kindly little boy he did not want to do it too harshly.

This is what happened.

‘I wish, Daddy,’ he said, coming to his point, ’that you wouldn’t write all this stuff about flying.  The chaps rot me.’

‘Yes!’ said his father.

‘And old Broomie, the Head I mean, he rots me.  Everybody rots me.’

‘But there is going to be flying—­quite soon.’

The little boy was too well bred to say what he thought of that.  ‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t write about it.’

‘You’ll fly—­lots of times—­before you die,’ the father assured him.

The little boy looked unhappy.

The father hesitated.  Then he opened a drawer and took out a blurred and under-developed photograph.  ‘Come and look at this,’ he said.

The little boy came round to him.  The photograph showed a stream and a meadow beyond, and some trees, and in the air a black, pencil-like object with flat wings on either side of it.  It was the first record of the first apparatus heavier than air that ever maintained itself in the air by mechanical force.  Across the margin was written:  ’Here we go up, up, up—­from S. P. Langley, Smithsonian Institution, Washington.’

The father watched the effect of this reassuring document upon his son.  ‘Well?’ he said.

‘That,’ said the schoolboy, after reflection, ‘is only a model.’

‘Model to-day, man to-morrow.’

The boy seemed divided in his allegiance.  Then he decided for what he believed quite firmly to be omniscience.  ‘But old Broomie,’ he said, ’he told all the boys in his class only yesterday, “no man will ever fly.”  No one, he says, who has ever shot grouse or pheasants on the wing would ever believe anything of the sort….’

Yet that boy lived to fly across the Atlantic and edit his father’s reminiscences.