In the earlier volumes we have been concerned with the growth of knowledge. For the most part the scientific delvers whose efforts have held our attention have been tacitly unmindful, or even explicitly contemptuous, of the influence upon practical life of the phenomena to the investigation of which they have devoted their lives. They were and are obviously seekers of truth for the mere love of truth.
But the phenomena of nature are not dissociated in fact, however much we may attempt to localize and classify them. And so it chances that even the most visionary devotee of abstract science is forever being carried into fields of investigation trenching closely upon the practicalities of every-day life. A Black investigating the laws of heat is preparing the way explicitly, however unconsciously, for a Watt with his perfected mechanism of the steam engine.
Similarly a Davy working at the Royal Institution with his newly invented batteries, and intent on the discovery of new elements and the elucidation of new principles, is the direct forerunner of Jablochkoff, Brush, and Edison with their commercial revolution in the production of artificial light.
Again Oersted and Faraday, earnestly seeking out[2] the fundamental facts as to the relations of electricity and magnetism, invent mechanisms which, though they seem but laboratory toys, are the direct forerunners of the modern dynamos that take so large a share in the world's work.
In a word, all along the line there is the closest association between what are commonly called the theoretical sciences and what with only partial propriety are termed the applied sciences. The linkage of one with the other must never be forgotten by anyone who would truly apprehend the status of those practical sciences which have revolutionized the civilization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in its most manifest aspects.
Nevertheless there is, to casual inspection, a somewhat radical distinction between theoretical and practical aspects of science—just as there are obvious differences between two sides of a shield. And as the theoretical aspects of science have largely claimed our attention hitherto, so its practical aspects will be explicitly put forward in the pages that follow. In the present volume we are concerned with those primitive applications of force through which man early learned to add to his working efficiency, and with the elaborate mechanisms—turbine wheels, steam engines, dynamos—through which he has been enabled to multiply his powers until it is scarcely exaggeration to say that he has made all Nature subservient to his will. It is this view which justifies the title of the volume, which might with equal propriety have been termed the Story of the World's Work.
