Section 4
The latent energy of coal and the power of steam waited long on the
verge of discovery, before they began to influence human lives.
There were no doubt many such devices as Hero's toys devised and
forgotten, time after time, in courts and palaces, but it needed that
coal should be mined and burning with plenty of iron at hand before it
dawned upon men that here was something more than a curiosity. And it is
to be remarked that the first recorded suggestion for the use of steam
was in war; there is an Elizabethan pamphlet in which it is proposed to
fire shot out of corked iron bottles full of heated water. The mining
of coal for fuel, the smelting of iron upon a larger scale than men had
ever done before, the steam pumping engine, the steam-engine and the
steam-boat, followed one another in an order that had a kind of logical
necessity. It is the most interesting and instructive chapter in
the history of the human intelligence, the history of steam from its
beginning as a fact in human consciousness to the perfection of the
great turbine engines that preceded the utilisation of intra-molecular
power. Nearly every human being must have seen steam, seen it
incuriously for many thousands of years; the women in particular were
always heating water, boiling it, seeing it boil away, seeing the lids
of vessels dance with its fury; millions of people at different times
must have watched steam pitching rocks out of volcanoes like cricket
balls and blowing pumice into foam, and yet you may search the whole
human record through, letters, books, inscriptions, pictures, for any
glimmer of a realisation that here was force, here was strength to
borrow and use.
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