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.
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