The World Set Free

Section 3

Such a man was that Leonardo da Vinci, who went about the court of Sforza in Milan in a state of dignified abstraction.  His common-place books are full of prophetic subtlety and ingenious anticipations of the methods of the early aviators.  Durer was his parallel and Roger Bacon—­whom the Franciscans silenced—­of his kindred.  Such a man again in an earlier city was Hero of Alexandria, who knew of the power of steam nineteen hundred years before it was first brought into use.  And earlier still was Archimedes of Syracuse, and still earlier the legendary Daedalus of Cnossos.  All up and down the record of history whenever there was a little leisure from war and brutality the seekers appeared.  And half the alchemists were of their tribe.

When Roger Bacon blew up his first batch of gunpowder one might have supposed that men would have gone at once to the explosive engine.  But they could see nothing of the sort.  They were not yet beginning to think of seeing things; their metallurgy was all too poor to make such engines even had they thought of them.  For a time they could not make instruments sound enough to stand this new force even for so rough a purpose as hurling a missile.  Their first guns had barrels of coopered timber, and the world waited for more than five hundred years before the explosive engine came.

Even when the seekers found, it was at first a long journey before the world could use their findings for any but the roughest, most obvious purposes.  If man in general was not still as absolutely blind to the unconquered energies about him as his paleolithic precursor, he was at best purblind.