Review of Reviews,  4 (1891), 556–63.

The Progress of the World

Anon

Genre:

Regular Feature, Editorial, News-Commentary

Subjects:

Electricity, Railways, Futurism, Energy, Matter Theory, Physics, Heterodoxy


    While Thomas A Edison is 'holding out a prospect of an electrical railway' in which the carriages will travel at 'the rate of a hundred miles an hour', William Crookes 'has been appalling the imagination of the electrical engineers by telling them of the enormous possibilities of energy stored up in matter'. Most significantly, however, 'that strange genius' John E W Keely has claimed to have 'discovered the secret of liberating the enormous energy that is locked up in every atom' by a 'certain vibration' that 'ruptures the envelope in which the molecules revolve'. Notes that 'Of course, if Keeley [sic] is right, we are on the eve of a revolution compared with which the utilisation of steam was as nothing; and it must be admitted that Mr. Crookes and other men of science have at least enabled ordinary mortals to admit the possibility that "there may be something in Keely after all"'. (563)



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