## CHAPTER THE FIRST. THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY

### Section 3

Holsten, before he died, was destined to see atomic energy dominating every other source of power, but for someyears yet a vast network of difficulties in detail and application kept the new discovery from any effectiveinvasion of ordinary life. The path from the laboratory to the workshop is sometimes a tortuous one;electro−magnetic radiations were known and demonstrated for twenty years before Marconi made thempractically available, and in the same way it was twenty years before induced radio−activity could be brought topractical utilisation. The thing, of course, was discussed very much, more perhaps at the time of its discovery thanduring the interval of technical adaptation, but with very little realisation of the huge economic revolution thatimpended. What chiefly impressed the journalists of 1933 was the production of gold from bismuth and therealisation albeit upon unprofitable lines of the alchemist's dreams; there was a considerable amount of discussionand expectation in that more intelligent section of the educated publics of the various civilised countries whichfollowed scientific development; but for the most part the world went about its business−−as the inhabitants ofthose Swiss villages which live under the perpetual threat of overhanging rocks and mountains go about theirbusiness−−just as though the possible was impossible, as though the inevitable was postponed for ever because itwas delayed.
It was in 1953 that the first Holsten−Roberts engine brought induced radio−activity into the sphere of industrialproduction, and its first general use was to replace the steam−engine in electrical generating stations. Hard uponthe appearance of this came the Dass−Tata engine−−the invention of two among the brilliant galaxy of Bengaliinventors the modernisation of Indian thought was producing at this time−−which was used chiefly forautomobiles, aeroplanes, waterplanes, and such−like, mobile purposes. The American Kemp engine, differingwidely in principle but equally practicable, and the Krupp−Erlanger came hard upon the heels of this, and by theautumn of 1954 a gigantic replacement of industrial methods and machinery was in progress all about thehabitable globe. Small wonder was this when the cost, even of these earliest and clumsiest of atomic engines, iscompared with that of the power they superseded. Allowing for lubrication the Dass−Tata engine, once it wasstarted cost a penny to run thirty−seven miles, and added only nine and quarter pounds to the weight of thecarriage it drove. It made the heavy alcohol−driven automobile of the time ridiculous in appearance as well aspreposterously costly. For many years the price of coal and every form of liquid fuel had been clambering tolevels that made even the revival of the draft horse seem a practicable possibility, and now with the abruptrelaxation of this stringency, the change in appearance of the traffic upon the world's roads was instantaneous. Inthree years the frightful armoured monsters that had hooted and smoked and thundered about the world for fourawful decades were swept away to the dealers in old metal, and the highways thronged with light and clean andshimmering shapes of silvered steel. At the same time a new impetus was given to aviation by the relativelyenormous power for weight of the atomic engine, it was at last possible to add Redmayne's ingenious helicopterascent and descent engine to the vertical propeller that had hitherto been the sole driving force of the aeroplanewithout overweighting the machine, and men found themselves possessed of an instrument of flight that couldhover or ascend or descend vertically and gently as well as rush wildly through the air. The last dread of flyingvanished. As the journalists of the time phrased it, this was the epoch of the Leap into the Air. The new atomicaeroplane became indeed a mania; every one of means was frantic to possess a thing so controllable, so secureand so free from the dust and danger of the road, and in France alone in the year 1943 thirty thousand of thesenew aeroplanes were manufactured and licensed, and soared humming softly into the sky.
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And with an equal speed atomic engines of various types invaded industrialism. The railways paid enormouspremiums for priority in the delivery of atomic traction engines, atomic smelting was embarked upon so eagerlyas to lead to a number of disastrous explosions due to inexperienced handling of the new power, and therevolutionary cheapening of both materials and electricity made the entire reconstruction of domestic buildings amatter merely dependent upon a reorganisation of the methods of the builder and the house−furnisher. Viewedfrom the side of the new power and from the point of view of those who financed and manufactured the newengines and material it required the age of the Leap into the Air was one of astonishing prosperity. Patent−holdingcompanies were presently paying dividends of five or six hundred per cent. and enormous fortunes were madeand fantastic wages earned by all who were concerned in the new developments. This prosperity was not a littleenhanced by the fact that in both the Dass−Tata and Holsten−Roberts engines one of the recoverable wasteproducts was gold−−the former disintegrated dust of bismuth and the latter dust of lead−−and that this new supplyof 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 richpeople−−every great city was as if a crawling ant−hill had suddenly taken wing−−was the bright side of theopening phase of the new epoch in human history. Beneath that brightness was a gathering darkness, a deepeningdismay. If there was a vast development of production there was also a huge destruction of values. These glaringfactories working night and day, these glittering new vehicles swinging noiselessly along the roads, these flightsof dragon−flies that swooped and soared and circled in the air, were indeed no more than the brightnesses oflamps and fires that gleam out when the world sinks towards twilight and the night. Between these high lightsaccumulated disaster, social catastrophe. The coal mines were manifestly doomed to closure at no very distantdate, the vast amount of capital invested in oil was becoming unsaleable, millions of coal miners, steel workersupon the old lines, vast swarms of unskilled or under−skilled labourers in innumerable occupations, were beingflung out of employment by the superior efficiency of the new machinery, the rapid fall in the cost of transit wasdestroying high land values at every centre of population, the value of existing house property had becomeproblematical, gold was undergoing headlong depreciation, all the securities upon which the credit of the worldrested were slipping and sliding, banks were tottering, the stock exchanges were scenes of feverish panic;−−thiswas the reverse of the spectacle, these were the black and monstrous under−consequences of the Leap into the### Air.

There is a story of a demented London stockbroker running out into Threadneedle Street and tearing off hisclothes as he ran. 'The Steel Trust is scrapping the whole of its plant,' he shouted. 'The State Railways are going toscrap all their engines. Everything's going to be scrapped−−everything. Come and scrap the mint, you fellows,come and scrap the mint!'
In the year 1955 the suicide rate for the United States of America quadrupled any previous record. There was anenormous increase also in violent crime throughout the world. The thing had come upon an unprepared humanity;it seemed as though human society was to be smashed by its own magnificent gains.
For there had been no foresight of these things. There had been no attempt anywhere even to compute theprobable dislocations this flood of inexpensive energy would produce in human affairs. The world in these dayswas not really governed at all, in the sense in which government came to be understood in subsequent years.Government was a treaty, not a design; it was forensic, conservative, disputatious, unseeing, unthinking,uncreative; throughout the world, except where the vestiges of absolutism still sheltered the court favourite andthe trusted servant, it was in the hands of the predominant caste of lawyers, who had an enormous advantage inbeing the only trained caste. Their professional education and every circumstance in the manipulation of thefantastically naive electoral methods by which they clambered to power, conspired to keep them contemptuous offacts, conscientiously unimaginative, alert to claim and seize advantages and suspicious of every generosity.Government was an obstructive business of energetic fractions, progress went on outside of and in spite of publicactivities, and legislation was the last crippling recognition of needs so clamorous and imperative and facts soaggressively established as to invade even the dingy seclusions of the judges and threaten the very existence of
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the otherwise inattentive political machine.
The world was so little governed that with the very coming of plenty, in the full tide of an incalculable abundance,when everything necessary to satisfy human needs and everything necessary to realise such will and purpose asexisted then in human hearts was already at hand, one has still to tell of hardship, famine, anger, confusion,conflict, and incoherent suffering. There was no scheme for the distribution of this vast new wealth that had comeat last within the reach of men; there was no clear conception that any such distribution was possible. As oneattempts a comprehensive view of those opening years of the new age, as one measures it against the latentachievement that later years have demonstrated, one begins to measure the blindness, the narrowness, theinsensate unimaginative individualism of the pre−atomic time. Under this tremendous dawn of power andfreedom, under a sky ablaze with promise, in the very presence of science standing like some bountiful goddessover all the squat darknesses of human life, holding patiently in her strong arms, until men chose to take them,security, plenty, the solution of riddles, the key of the bravest adventures, in her very presence, and with theearnest of her gifts in court, the world was to witness such things as the squalid spectacle of the Dass−Tata patentlitigation.
There in a stuffy court in London, a grimy oblong box of a room, during the exceptional heat of the May of 1956,the leading counsel of the day argued and shouted over a miserable little matter of more royalties or less andwhether the Dass−Tata company might not bar the Holsten−Roberts' methods of utilising the new power. TheDass−Tata people were indeed making a strenuous attempt to secure a world monopoly in atomic engineering.The judge, after the manner of those times, sat raised above the court, wearing a preposterous gown and a foolishhuge wig, the counsel also wore dirty−looking little wigs and queer black gowns over their usual costume, wigsand gowns that were held to be necessary to their pleading, and upon unclean wooden benches stirred andwhispered artful−looking solicitors, busily scribbling reporters, the parties to the case, expert witnesses, interestedpeople, and a jostling confusion of subpoenaed persons, briefless young barristers (forming a style on the mostesteemed and truculent examples) and casual eccentric spectators who preferred this pit of iniquity to the freesunlight outside. Every one was damply hot, the examining King's Counsel wiped the perspiration from his huge,clean−shaven upper lip; and into this atmosphere of grasping contention and human exhalations the daylightfiltered through a window that was manifestly dirty. The jury sat in a double pew to the left of the judge, lookingas uncomfortable as frogs that have fallen into an ash−pit, and in the witness−box lied the would−be omnivorousDass, under cross−examination....
Holsten had always been accustomed to publish his results so soon as they appeared to him to be sufficientlyadvanced to furnish a basis for further work, and to that confiding disposition and one happy flash of adaptiveinvention the alert Dass owed his claim....
But indeed a vast multitude of such sharp people were clutching, patenting, pre−empting, monopolising this orthat feature of the new development, seeking to subdue this gigantic winged power to the purposes of their littlelusts and avarice. That trial is just one of innumerable disputes of the same kind. For a time the face of the worldfestered with patent legislation. It chanced, however, to have one oddly dramatic feature in the fact that Holsten,after being kept waiting about the court for two days as a beggar might have waited at a rich man's door, afterbeing bullied by ushers and watched by policemen, was called as a witness, rather severely handled by counsel,and told not to 'quibble' by the judge when he was trying to be absolutely explicit.
The judge scratched his nose with a quill pen, and sneered at Holsten's astonishment round the corner of hismonstrous wig. Holsten was a great man, was he? Well, in a law−court great men were put in their places.
'We want to know has the plaintiff added anything to this or hasn't he?' said the judge, 'we don't want to have yourviews whether Sir Philip Dass's improvements were merely superficial adaptations or whether they were implicitin your paper. No doubt−−after the manner of inventors−−you think most things that were ever likely to bediscovered are implicit in your papers. No doubt also you think too that most subsequent additions and
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modifications are merely superficial. Inventors have a way of thinking that. The law isn't concerned with that sortof thing. The law has nothing to do with the vanity of inventors. The law is concerned with the question whetherthese patent rights have the novelty the plantiff claims for them. What that admission may or may not stop, and allthese other things you are saying in your overflowing zeal to answer more than the questions addressed toyou−−none of these things have anything whatever to do with the case in hand. It is a matter of constantastonishment to me in this court to see how you scientific men, with all your extraordinary claims to precision andveracity, wander and wander so soon as you get into the witness−box. I know no more unsatisfactory class ofwitness. The plain and simple question is, has Sir Philip Dass made any real addition to existing knowledge andmethods in this matter or has he not? We don't want to know whether they were large or small additions nor whatthe consequences of your admission may be. That you will leave to us.'
Holsten was silent.
'Surely?' said the judge, almost pityingly.
'No, he hasn't,' said Holsten, perceiving that for once in his life he must disregard infinitesimals.
'Ah!' said the judge, 'now why couldn't you say that when counsel put the question? . . .'
An entry in Holsten's diary−autobiography, dated five days later, runs: 'Still amazed. The law is the mostdangerous thing in this country. It is hundreds of years old. It hasn't an idea. The oldest of old bottles and this newwine, the most explosive wine. Something will overtake them.'