Black on White

Headlines have been fanciful in recent days, as a result of the meeting of a national chemical society. Predictions of synthetic miracles, approximate immortality, scientific marvels in food and feelings….Unfortunately the promised Methuselah trick is sure to be at the bottom of the bag and all of us will miss some of the best numbers.

But some of the tricks are already on display and the magicians are rolling up their sleeves for a few others due soon. In a world that contains Hitler, unemployment and overdrawn check accounts, they provide a diversion. They demonstrate that the world moves on despite our troubles.

In England and Germany television is being introduced to the public and the first steps towards it have been taken in America. Soon, too soon, we shall not only have to listen to Amos ‘n Andy but must see them as well. The most celebrated American actor, Mickey Mouse, will be in every man’s home; and the only temple that draws men of all religions or none, Shirley Temple, will be turned on like a faucet.

Stratosphere flying, now in its vague beginnings, will be a fact and incredible speeds—a thousand miles an hour, for instance—will be commonplace. Uninvited dinner guests will be dropping in from Shanghai or London and we shall commute across the Atlantic. Eventually rocket specials will peat the sun around the earth; we shall be able to go clear around the globe and right back to the starting point in less than a day—which will be the perfect symbol of highly scientific futility.

The houses we shall live in will be as different from today’s, as the Empire State is from a nomad’s tent. Of modern housing only the mortgages will remain unchanged. For the rest, they will be pre-fabricated, purchased by model number, and assembled on the spot in a day or two. The first of these factory-made homes are already on display in department stores and it is only a matter of a few years before they will be in general use.

The pre-fabricated house, moreover, implies the whole complex of electrical servants, which will give heat in winter and coolness in summer, will prepare meals and help digest them, will—but do your own imagining.

Life, in brief, will be comfortable, efficient, and smooth; disease will be so thoroughly banished that everyone will die in perfect health.

A system of facsimile transmission by radio is already invented and almost ready for use which must in the long-run revolutionize journalism, long-distance communication and other aspects of our everyday existence. There have been some hints of this development in the press, but they did not even suggest the reality.

Newspapers, with the facsimile gadget, will roll off your radio like ticker tape—department store advertisements, comic strips and all. The London Times or Moscow Izvestia will be delivered on your breakfast table by radio, provided you have a radio and breakfast. Letters will be transmitted instantaneously, at so much a square inch.

We shall carry pocket telephones and will summon whomsoever we please wheresover they may be on the face of the globe. The only catch in this trick is that others will be similarly equipped and there will be no escaping the insurance salesman ever again.

A man who is intimately connected with the day-to-day elaboration of these miracles, as the head of a research organization, said the other day:

“There is nothing which the human mind can imagine that the technical laboratory cannot produce. Again and again I have told my engineers that such-and-such a thing would be useful or interesting. In a week, or a month, or a year they had produced it, though at the time it had seemed impossible.

“In fact, the laboratory surpasses the imagination. It is developing things far beyond our poor capacity to imagine.”

It is only in the sphere of social relations that we remain backward, hamstrung and almost hopeless. The men who achieve extraordinary technical inventions are utterly stumped in devising some method for making these inventions available to humanity across the barriers of private ownership, economic expediency and greed.

All the same, these tricks of science are fascinating to behold. Before taking that last nose-dive from the thirty-second floor consider the excitement you’re missing by leaving the theatre too soon.