BELLOC-FIRST AND LAST - The Inventor
I had a day free between two lectures in the south-west of England, and
I spent it stopping at a town in which there was a large and very
comfortable old posting-house or coaching-inn. I had meant to stay some
few hours there and to take the last train out in the evening, and I had
meant to spend those hours alone and resting; but this was not permitted
me, for just as I had taken up the local paper, which was a humble,
reasonable thing, empty of any passion and violence and very reposeful
to read, a man came up and touched my left elbow sharply: a gesture not
at all to my taste nor, I think, to that of anyone who is trying to read
his paper.
I looked up and saw a man who must have been quite sixty years of age.
He had on a soft, felt slouch hat, a very old and greenish black coat;
he stooped and shuffled; he was clean-shaven, with long grey hair, and
his eyes were astonishingly bright and piercing and set close together.
He said, "I beg your pardon."
I said, "Eh, what?"
He said again "I beg your pardon" in the tones of a man who almost
commands, and having said this he put his hat on the table, dragged a
chair quite close to mine, and pulled a folded bunch of foolscap sheets
out of his pocket. His manner was that of a man who engages your
attention and has a right to engage it. There were no preliminaries and
there was no introduction. This was apparently his manner, and I
submitted.
"I have here," he said, fixing me with his intense eyes, "the plans for
a speedometer."
"Oh!" said I.
"You know what a speedometer is?" he asked suspiciously.
I said yes. I said it was a machine for measuring the speed of vehicles,
and that it was compounded of two (or more) Greek words.
He nodded; he was pleased that I knew so much, and could therefore
listen to his tale and understand it. He pulled his grey baggy trousers
up over the knee, settled himself, sitting forward, and opened his
document. He cleared his throat, still fixing me with those eyes of his,
and said--
"Every speedometer up to now has depended upon the same principle as a
Watt's governor; that is, there are two little balls attached to each by
a limb to a central shaft: they rise and fall according to their speed
of rotation, and this movement is indicated upon a dial."
I nodded.
He cleared his throat again. "Of course, that is unsatisfactory."
"Damnably!" said I, but this reply did not check him.
"It works tolerably well at high speeds; at low speeds it is useless;
and then again there is a very rapid fluctuation, and the instrument is
of only approximate precision."
"Not it!" said I to encourage him.
"There is one exception," he continued, "to this principle, and that is
a speedometer which depends upon the introduction of resistance into a
current generated by a small magneto. The faster the magneto turns the
stronger the current generated, and the change is indicated upon a
dial."
"Yes," said I sadly, "as in the former case so in this; the change of
speed is indicated upon a dial." And I sighed.
"But this method also," he went on tenaciously, "has its defects."
"You may lay to that," I interrupted.
"It has the defect that at high speeds its readings are not quite
correct, and at very low speeds still less so. Moreover, it is said that
it slightly deteriorates with the passage of time."
"Now that," I broke in emphatically, "is a defect I have discovered
in----"
But he put up his hand to stop me. "It slightly deteriorates, I say,
with the passage of time." He paused a moment impressively. "No one has
hitherto discovered any system which will accurately record the speed of
a vehicle or of any rotary movement and register it at the lowest as at
the highest speeds." He paused again for a still longer period in order
to give still greater emphasis to what he had to say. He concluded in a
new note of sober triumph: "I have solved the problem!"
I thought this was the end of him, and I got up and beamed a
congratulation at him and asked if he would drink anything, but he only
said, "Please sit down again and I will explain."
There is no way of combating this sort of thing, and so I sat down, and
he went on:
"It is perfectly simple...." He passed his hand over his forehead. "It
is so simple that one would say it must have been thought of before; but
that is what is always said of a great invention.... Now I have here"
(and he opened out his foolscap) "the full details. But I will not read
them to you; I will summarize them briefly."
"Have you a plan or anything I could watch?" said I a little anxiously.
"No," he answered sharply, "I have not, but if you like I will draw a
rough sketch as I go along upon the margin of your newspaper."
"Thank you," I said.
He drew the newspaper towards him and put it on his knee. He pulled out
a pencil; he held the foolscap up before his eye, and he began to
describe.
"The general principle upon which my speedometer reposes," he said
solemnly, "is the coordination of the cylinder and the cone upon an
angle which will have to be determined in practice, and will probably
vary for different types. But it will never fall below 15 nor rise over
43."
"I should have thought----" I began, but he told me I could not yet have
grasped it, and that he wished to be more explicit.
"On a king bolt," he said, occasionally consulting his notes, "runs a
pivot in bevel which is kept in place by a small hair-spring, which
spring fits loosely on the Conkling Shaft."
"Exactly," said I, "I see what is coming."
But he wouldn't let me off so easily.
"Yes, of course you are going to say that the whole will be keyed
together, and that the T-pattern nuts on a movable shank will be my
method of attachment to the fixed portion next to the cam? Eh? So it is,
but" (and here his eye brightened), "anyone could have arranged
that. My particularity is that I have a freedom of movement even at the
lowest speeds, and an accuracy of notation even at the highest, which is
secured in a wholly novel manner ... and yet so simply. What do you
think it is?"
I affected to look puzzled, and thought for a moment. "I cannot
imagine," said I, "unless----"
"No," he interrupted, "do not try to guess it, for you never will. I
turn the flange inward on a Wilkinson lathe and give it a parabolic
section so that the axes are always parallel to each other and to the
shaft.... There!"
I had no idea the man could be so moved: there was jubilation in his
voice.
"There!" he said again, as though some effort of the brain had exhausted
him. "It can't be touched, mind you," he added suspiciously; "I've taken
out the provisional patents. There's one man I know wants to fight it in
the courts as an infringement on Wilkinson's own patent, but it can't be
touched!" He shook his head decisively. "No! my lawyer's certain of
that--and so'm I!"
Here there was a break in his communications, so to speak, and he had
apparently run out. It was not for me to wind him up again. I watched
him with a sombre relief as he stood up again to full height, leaned his
head back, and sighed profoundly with satisfaction and with completion.
He folded up his specification and put it in his pocket again. He tore
off the incomprehensible sketch he had made with his pencil while he was
speaking, and put it by me on the mantelshelf. "You might like to keep
it," he said pathetically; "it's a document, that is; it will be famous
some day." He looked at it lovingly, almost as though he was going to
take it back again: but he thought better of it.
I was waiting, I will not say itching, for him to take his leave, when a
god or demon, that same perhaps which had treated the poor fellow as a
jest for a whole lifetime, inspired him to take a very false step
indeed. He had already taken up his hat and was turning as though to go
to the door, when the unfortunate thought struck him.
"What would you do?" he said.
"How do you mean?" I answered.
"Why, what would you do to try and get it taken up and talked about?"
Then it was my turn, and I let him have it.
"You must get the Press and the Government to work together," I said
rapidly, "and particularly in connection with the new Government Service
of Camion's Fettle-Trains and Cursory Circuits."
He nodded like one who thoroughly understands and desires to hear more.
"Speed," I added nonchalantly, "and the measure of it are of course
essentials in their case."
He nodded again.
"And they have never really settled the problem ... especially about
Fettle-Trains."
"No," said he ponderously, "so I understand."
"Well now," I went on, full of the chase, "you will naturally ask me who
are you to go to?" I scratched my nose. "You know the Fusionary Office,
as we call it? It is really, of course, a part of the Stannaries. But
the Chief Permanent Secretary likes to have it called the Fusionary
Office; it's his vanity."
"Yes," said he eagerly, "yes, go on!"
"They always have the same hours," I said, "four to eleven."
"Four to what?" he asked, looking up.
"To eleven," I repeated sharply; "but you'd much better call round about
three."
He looked bewildered.
"Don't interrupt," I said, seeing him open his lips, "or I shall lose
the thread. It's rather complicated. You call at three by the little
door in Whitehall on the Embankment side towards the Horse Guards
looking south, and don't ring the bell."
"Why not?" he asked. I thought for the moment he might begin to cry.
"Oh, well," I said testily, "you mustn't ask those questions. All these
institutions are very old institutions with habits and prejudices of
their own. You mustn't ring the bell, that's all; they don't like it;
you must just wait until they open; and then, if you take my
advice, don't write a note or ask to interview the First Analyist. Don't
do any of the usual things, but just fill up one of the regular Treasury
forms and state that you have come with regard to the Perception and
Mensuration advertisements."
His face was pained and wrinkled as he heard me, but he said, "I beg
your pardon ... but shall I have it all explained to me at the office?"
"Certainly not!" I said, aghast; "it's just because you might have so
much difficulty there that I'm explaining everything to you."
"Yes, I know," he said doubtfully; "thank you."
"I hope you'll try and follow what I say," I continued a little wearily;
"I have special opportunities for knowing.... Political, you know."
"Certainly," he said, "certainly; but about those forms?"
"Well," I said, "you didn't suppose they supplied them, did you?"
"I almost did," he ventured.
"Oh, you did," said I, with a loud laugh, "well, you're wrong there.
However, I dare say I've got one on me." He looked up eagerly as I felt
in my pockets. I brought out a telegraph blank, two letters, and a
tobacco pouch. I looked at them for a moment. "No," said I, "I haven't
got one; it's a pity, but I'll tell you who will give you one; you know
the place opposite, where the bills are drafted?"
"I'm afraid I don't," he said, admitting ignorance for the first time in
this conversation and perhaps in his life.
"Well," said I impatiently, "never mind, anyone will show you. Go there,
and if they don't give you a form they'll show you a copy of Paper B,
which is much the same thing."
"Thank you," said he humbly, and he got up to move out. He was going a
little groggily, his eyes were dull and sodden. He presented all the
aspect of a man under a heavy strain.
"You've got it all clear, I hope?" I asked cheerfully as he neared the
door.
"Oh, yes!" he said. "Thank you; yes!"
"Anything else?" I shouted as he passed out into the courtyard.
"Anything else I can do? You'll always find me in the room over the
office, Room H, down the little iron staircase," I nodded genially to
him as he disappeared.
In this way did we exchange, the Inventor and I, those expert
confidences and mutual aids in either's technical skill which are too
rarely discovered in modern travel.
England is a country with edges and with a core. It is a country very
small for the number of people who live in it, and very appreciable to
the eye for the traveller who travels on foot or in a boat from place to
place. Considering the part it has in the making of the world, it might
justly be compared to a jewel which is very small and very valuable and
can almost be held in the hand. The physical appreciation of England is
to be reached by an appreciation of landscape.
It so happens that England is traversed by remarkable and sudden ranges;
hills with a sharp escarpment overlooking great undulating plains. This
is not true of any other one country of Europe, but it is true of
England, and a man who professes to consider, to understand, to
criticize, to defend, and to love this country, must know the Pennines,
the Cotswolds, the North and the South Downs, the Chilterns, the
Mendips, and the Malverns; he must know Delamere Forest, and he must
know the Hill of Beeston, from which all Cheshire may be perceived. If
he knows these heights and has long considered the prospects which they
afford, he can claim to have seen the face of England.
It is deplorable that our modern method of travel does cut us off from
such experiences. They were not only common to, they were necessary to
our fathers; the roads would not be at the expense of tunnelling through
hills, and (what is more important) when those men who most mould the
knowledge of the country by the country (the people who deal with its
soil, who live separate upon its separate farms) visited each other upon
horses; and horses, unlike railway trains, cannot climb hills. They
puff, they heave, they snort, as do railway trains, but they climb them
well.
On this account, because the roads for the carriages went over hills,
and because the method of visiting even a near neighbour would permit
you to go over hills, the England of quite a little time ago was
familiar with the half-dozen great landscapes of England. You may see it
in that most individual, that most peculiar, and, I think, that most
glorious school of painters, the English landscape painter, Constable
with his thick colours, Turner with his wonderment, and even the
portrait painters in their backgrounds depend upon the view of the
plains from a height. To-day our landscape painters sometimes do the
same, but the market for that emotion is capricious, it is no longer the
secure and natural way of presenting England to English eyes.
If you will consider these plains at the foot of the English hills you
will find in them the whole history of the country, and the whole
meaning of it as well. Two occur to me first: The view of the Weald
(both Kentish and Sussex) through which the influence of Europe
perpetually approached the island, not only in the crisis of the Roman
or the Norman invasions, but in a hundred episodes stretched out through
two thousand years--and the view of the Thames Valley as one gets it on
a clear day from the summits of the North Downs when one looks northward
and sees very faintly the Chilterns along the horizon.
This last is obscured by London. One needs a very particular
circumstance in which to appreciate it. The air must be dry and clear,
there must be little or no wind, or if there is a wind it must be a
strong one from the south and west that has already driven the smoke
from the western edge of the town. When this is so, a man looks right
across to the sandy heights just north of the Thames, and far beyond he
sees the Chilterns, like a landfall upon the rim of the world. He looks
at all that soil on which the government of this country has been
rooted. He sees the hill of Windsor. He overlooks, though he cannot
perceive at so great a distance, the two great schools of the rich; he
has within one view the principal Castle of the Kings, the place of
their council, and the cathedral of their capital city: so true is it
that the Thames made England.
Then, if you consider the upper half of that valley, the view is from
the ridge of the Berkshire hills, or, better still, from Cumnor, or from
the clump of trees above Faringdon. From such look-outs the astonishing
loneliness which England has had the strength to preserve in this
historic belt of land profoundly strikes a man. You can see to your left
and, a long way off, the hill where, as is most probable, Alfred thrust
back the Pagans, and so saved one-half of Christendom. Oxford is within
your landscape. The roll upwards in a glacis of the Cotswold, the nodal
point of the Roman roads at Cirencester, and the ancient crossings of
the Thames.
From the Cotswold again westward you look over a sheer wall and see one
of those differences which make up England. For the passage from the
Upper Thames to the flat and luxuriant valley floor of the Severn is a
transition (if it be made by crossing the hills) more sudden than that
between many countries abroad. Had our feudalism cut England into
provinces we should here have two marked provincial histories marching
together, for the natural contrast is greater than between Normandy and
Brittany at any part of their march or between Aragon and Castile at any
part of theirs. I do not know what it is, but the view of the jagged
Malvern seen above the happy mists of autumn, when these mists lie like
a warm fleece upon the orchards of the vale, preserving them of a
morning until the strengthening of the sun, the sudden aspect, I say, of
those jagged peaks strikes one like a vision of a new world. How many
men have thought it! How often it ought to be written down! It hangs in
the memory of the traveller like a permanent benediction, and remains in
his mind a standing symbol of peace.
I have no space to speak of how from Beeston you see all Cheshire; the
Vale Royal to your left, and the main plain of the county to your right.
The whole stretch is framed in with definite hills, the last and highly
marked line of the Pennines bounds the view upon the east; upon the west
the first of the Welsh hills stands sharply in a long even line against
the fading sun; and on the north you see the height of Delamere. There
are three other views in the North of England, the first easy, the last
two difficult to obtain, all between them making up a true picture of
what the North of England is. The first (and it is very famous) is the
view over the industrial ferment of South Lancashire, seen from the
complete silence of the hills round the Peak. No matter where you cross
that summit, even if you take the high road from the Snake Inn to
Glossop, where the easiest, and therefore the least striking, passage
has been chosen, much more if you follow the wild heights a little to
the south until you come to a more abrupt descent on which there are not
even paths, there comes a point where there is presented to you in one
great offering, without introduction, a vision of the vast energies of
England.
I remember once in winter when the sun sets early (it was December, and
seven years ago) coming upon this sight. The clouds were so arranged
after an Atlantic storm that all the heaven (which here is always
spacious and noble) was covered with a rolling curtain as though a man
had pulled it with his hands. But far off, westward, there was a broad
red band of sunset, and against this the smoke, the tall stacks, the
violence and the wealth of that cauldron. One could almost hear the
noise. It did arrest one; it was as though someone had painted something
unreal, to be a mystical emblem, and to sum up in one picture all those
million despairs, misfortunes, chances, disciplines, and acquirements
which make up the character of Lancashire men. This vision also many men
have seen and many men shall write of. Very rarely upon the surface of
the earth does the soul take on so immediate and obvious a physical body
as does the soul of that industrial world in the view of which I speak.
And the two other views are, first, that difficult one which one must
pick and choose but which can be obtained from several sites (especially
at the end of Wensleydale), and which is the view of that rich, old, and
agricultural Yorkshire, from which the county draws its traditions and
in which, perhaps, the truest spirit of the county still abides; for
Yorkshire is at heart farmer, and possibly after three generations of a
town, a man from this part of England still looks more lively when he
sees a lively horse put before him for judgment. Second, the view from
Cross Fell, very, very difficult to obtain, for often when one climbs
Cross Fell in sunny weather, one gets up over the Scar under the threat
of cloud, and one only reaches the summit by the time the evening or the
mist has fallen; but if one has the luck to see the view of which I
speak, then one sees all that rugged remaining part of the Northwest
exactly as the Romans saw it, and as it has been for two thousand years,
with the high land of the lakes and the stony nature and the sparseness
of all the stretch about one, and the approach to a foreign land.
I have often thought when I have heard men blaming the story of England
or her present mood for false reasons, or, what is worse, praising her
for false reasons; when I have heard the men of the cities talking wild
talk got from maps and from print, or the disappointed men talking wild
talk of another kind, expecting impossible or foreign perfections from
their own kindred--I have often thought, I say, when I have heard the
folly upon either side (and the mass of it daily increases)--that it
would be a wholesome thing if one could take such a talker and make him
walk from Dover to the Solway, exercising some care that he should rise
before the sun, and that he should see in clear weather the views of
which I speak. A man who has done that has seen England--not the name or
the map or the rhetorical catchword, but the thing. And it does not take
so very long.
Those who are interested in what simple straightforward people call the
Pathology of Consciousness have gathered a great body of evidence upon
the various manias that affect men, and there is an especially
interesting department of this which concerns illusion upon matters
which in the sane are determinable by the senses and common experience.
Thus one man will believe himself to be the Emperor of China, another to
be William Shakespeare or some other impossible person, though one would
imagine that his every accident of daily life would convince him to the
contrary.
I had recently occasion to watch one of the most harmless and yet one of
the most striking of these illusions in a private asylum which has
specialized, if I may so express myself, upon men of letters. The case
was harmless and even benign, for the poor fellow was not of a combative
disposition to begin with, was of too careful and dignified a
temperament to show more than slight irritation if his delusion were
contradicted. This misfortune, however, very rarely overtook him, for
those who came to visit him were warned to humour his whim. This
eccentricity I will now describe.
He imagined, nay he was convinced, that he was existing fifty years in
the future, and that the interest of his conversation for others would
lie in his reminiscence of the state of society in which we are actually
living today. If anyone who had not been warned was imprudent enough to
suggest that the conversation was taking place in 1909 would smile
gently, nod, and say rather bitterly, "Yes, I know, I know," as though
recognizing a universal plot against him which he was too weary to
combat. But when he had said this he would continue to talk on as though
both parties to the conversation were equally convinced that the year
was really 1960 or thereabouts. Whether to add zest to what he said or
from some part of his malady consonant with all the rest, my poor friend
(who had been a journalist and will very possibly be a journalist again)
presupposed that the whole structure of society as we now know it had
changed and that his reminiscences were those of a past time which, on
account of some great revolution or other, men imperfectly comprehended,
so that it must be of the highest interest and advantage to listen to
the testimony of an eye-witness upon them.
What especially delighted him (for he was a zealous admirer of the
society he described) was the method of government.
"There was no possibility of going wrong," he said to me with curious
zeal, "not a shadow of danger! It would be difficult for you to
understand now how easily the system worked!" And here he sighed
profoundly. "And why on earth," he continued, "men should have destroyed
such an instrument when they had it is more than I can understand. There
it was in every country in Europe; there were elections; all the men
voted. And mind you, the elections were not so very far apart. Most
people living at one election could remember the last, so there was no
time for abuses to spring up.... Well, everybody voted. If a man wanted
one thing he voted one way, and if he wanted another thing he voted the
other way. The people for whom he voted would then meet, and with a
sense of duty which I cannot exaggerate they would work month after
month exactly to reproduce the will of those who had appointed them. It
was a great time!"
"Yet," said I, "even so there must have been occasional divergences
between what these people did and what the nation wanted."
"I see what you mean," he said, musing, "you mean that all the devotion
in the world, the purest of motives and the most devoted sense of duty,
could not keep the elected always in contact with the electors. You are
right. But you must remember that in every country there was a
machinery, with regard to the most important measures at least, which
could throw the matter before the electors to be re-decided. I can
remember no important occasion upon which the machinery was not brought
into use."
"But, after all, the value of the decisions of the electorate you are
describing," said I, continuing to humour him, "would depend upon the
information which the electorate had received as well as upon their
judgment."
"As for their judgment," he said, a little shortly, "it is not for our
time to criticize theirs. Human judgment is not infallible, but I can
well remember how in every nation of Europe it was the fixed conviction
of the citizens that judgment was their chief characteristic, and
especially judgment in national affairs. I cannot believe that so
universal an attitude of the mind could have arisen had it not been
justified. But as for information, they had the Press ... a free Press!"
Here he fell into a reverie, so powerfully did his supposed memories
affect him.
I was willing to lead him on, because this kind of illness is best met
by sympathy, and also because I was not uninterested to discover how his
own trade had affected him.
"You would hardly understand it," he said sadly; "what you hear from me
is nothing but words.... I wish I could have shown you one of those
great houses with information pouring in as rapid, as light, and as
clear, from every hidden corner of the world, digested by master brains
into the most lucid and terse presentment of it possible, and then
whirled out on great wheels to be distributed by the thousand and the
hundred thousand, to the hungry intelligence of Europe. There was
nothing escaped it--nothing. In every capital were crowds of men
dispatched from the other capitals of our civilization, moving with ease
in the wealthiest houses, and exquisitely in touch with the most
delicate phases of national life everywhere. And these men were such
experts in selection that a picture of Europe as a whole was presented
every morning to each particular part of Europe; and nowhere was this
more successfully accomplished than in my own beloved town of London."
"It must have been useful," I said, "not only for the political purposes
you describe, but also for investors. Indeed, I should imagine that the
two things ran together."
"You are right," he said with interest, "the wide knowledge which even
the poorest of the people possessed upon foreign affairs, through the
action of the Press, was, further, of the utmost and most beneficent
effect in teaching even the smallest proprietor what he need do with his
capital. A discovery of metallic ore--especially of gold--a new
invention, anything which might require development, was at once
presented in its most exact aspect to the reader."
"It was probably upon that account," said I, "that property was so
equally distributed, and that so general a prosperity reigned as you
have often described to me."
"You are right," said he; "it was mainly this accurate and universal
daily information which produced such excellent results."
"But it occurs to me," said I, by way of stimulating his conversation
with an objection, "that if so passionate and tenacious a habit of
telling the exact truth upon innumerable things was present in this old
institution of which you speak, it cannot but have bred a certain amount
of dissension, and it must sometimes even have done definite harm to
individuals whose private actions were thus exposed."
"You are right," said he; "the danger of such misfortunes was always
present, and with the greatest desire in the world to support only what
was worthy the writers of the journals of which I speak would
occasionally blunder against private interests; but there was a remedy."
"What was that?" I asked.
"Why, the law provided that in this matter twelve men called a jury,
instructed by a judge, after the matter had been fully explained to them
by two other men whose business it was to examine the truth boldly for
the sake of justice--I say the law provided that the twelve men after
this process should decide whether the person injured should receive
money from the newspaper or no, and if so, in what amount. And, lest
there should still be any manner of doubt, the judge was permitted to
set aside their verdict if he thought it unjust. To secure his absolute
impartiality as between rich and poor he was paid somewhat over 100 a
week, a large salary in those days, and he was further granted the right
of imprisoning people at will or of taking away their property if he
believed them to obstruct his judgment. Nor were these the only
safeguards. For in the case of very rich men, to whom justice might not
be done on account of the natural envy of their poorer fellow-citizens,
it was arranged that the jury should consist only of rich men. In this
way it was absolutely certain that a complete impartiality would reign.
We shall never see those days again," he concluded.
"But do you not think," I said before I left him, "that the social
perfection of the kind you have described must rather have been due to
some spirit of the time than to particular institutions? For after all
the zealous love of justice and the sense of duty which you describe are
not social elements to be produced by laws."
"Possibly," he said, wearily, "possibly, but we shall never see it
again!"
And I left him looking into the fire with infinite sadness and
reflecting upon his lost youth and the year 1909: a pathetic figure, and
one whose upkeep during the period of his deficiency was a very serious
drain upon the resources of his family.
BELLOC-FIRST AND LAST - The Inventor