All inventions that have ever been made serve the general purpose ofassisting man in his praiseworthy effort to pass through life with a maximum of pleasure in exchange for a minimum of effort.

But some of them are merely multiplications(or extensions or intensifications or augmentations)of certain physical attributes, such as“speaking”or“walking”or“‘throwing”or“‘listening”or“looking,”while others are the result of man's desire to keep his body and his faculties in decent comfort and repair.

The division which I here offer is a very loose one. Many of the inventions overlap.But the same is true of all attempts at scientific classification.Nature herself is hopelessly complicated and man happens to be the most complicated of all her achievements.As a result, everything connected with man or his desires or his accomplishments is a vast mass of the most extravagant contradictions.

I feel it my duty to tell you this, for if you happen to be a thoroughgoing classification fan, you will discover a great many things in this book which will irritate you most terribly and you had better exchange it for a handbook of botany or a couple of time-tables. All of which are guaranteed to be without error or exaggeration.

For example, take the inventions connected with man's skin. Do they belong to the first division—to the inventions which are connected with survival—or to the second one(which I hope to write about afterwards)—to the inventions connected with“maintenance and repair”?I really don't know, hut I have decided to include them in the present volume.Nowadays we take them so absolutely for granted that it would seem as if they belonged in the second department and served no other purpose than that of“maintenance.”But in the beginning they had more to do with keeping men from becoming a defunct species of animal than almost any other agency.And so I shall include them here.

And here goes!

Ever since the beginning of time, animals had gone about ha a state of complete nakedness. However much they had suffered from the cold, none of them had ever thought of protecting itself against snow and icy blasts by renforcing its own skin with a layer of artificial heat, provided by the skin of one of its departed brethren.They sometimes sought the shelter of a rock during a blizzard or a hailstorm, but that was quite as far as they went.

The idea of putting on a coat when it is cold seems so incredibly simple that we can hardly imagine a time when man had not yet learned that one could assure one's body against sudden changes of temperature by coveting it with a layer of animal or vegetable matter, either in the form of the skin of a dead animal or in that of a woolen blanket or a linen coat or a mantle woven out of the grass or the leaves of a plant or tree.

But you will notice throughout this book that very often the least complicated innovations were the last ones to be thought of and that it took an enormous amount of perseverance and ingenuity on the part of hundreds of thousands of bright people to evolve even the simplest of simple devices and carry them to a practical solution.

Of course we never know the names of those true pioneers of progress. But there must have been some one who was the“first”to venture forth clad in the hide of a cow or the pelt of a bear, just as in our own times there was one“first”person to tolk into a telephone and a“first”person to listen to the first weak sounds of a written telegram.And I feel convinced that the“first”man to appear in an overcoat caused a great deal more commotion than the first man who drove down Fifth Avenue in a horseless carriage.

Very likely he was mobbed.

Even more likely he was killed as a dangerous sorcerer who tried to interfere with the will of the gods who on the day of creation had decided that man should ever suffer from cold when it was winter and from heat when it was summer.

Skins, however, must have been galore in a world that rived by hunting and the new invention had come to stay, as you may see for yourself by looking out of your window.

But the ordinary skins of ordinary dead animals suffered from several disadvantages. In the first place, they were terribly smelly, as prehistoric man had no way of preparing them except by letting them dry in the sun.The stench, however, can't have meant very much to people used to spending their days and nights among the decaying remnants of all their previous meals.But they were apt to crack and they did not fit the form of the body very well, in consequence whereof they were full of draughts and of no earthly use in a storm or a blizzard.And so the Inquisitive Ones(the only people who have ever done anything worth mentioning for the human race)said to themselves:“So far, so good, but can't we find a more comfortable substitute for our substitute-skins?”and they set to work and produced a number of“just-as-good”articles which have played a tremendous rle in the history of human progress.I refer to those products which we know by the names of cotton, wool, linen and silk, all of which seem to have come to us from Asia.

Perhaps you will object that the word“‘seem”occurs a little too frequently in these pages to make you feel that I have the slightest scientific confidence in the statements I am making. Well, you would not be so very far wrong.I am like a person trying to solve an intricate puzzle in a dark room.Up to fifty or sixty years ago, we did not even know that there was such a thing as prehistoric history.We said:“Civilization begins with Abraham leaving the land of Ur,”or if we were very audacious, we went 2000 years further back and boldly proclaimed:“Civilization begins with the Egyptians and the Babylonians.”

We knew, of course, that Chinese history was a great deal more ancient than that of western Asia and northern Africa, but the Chinese were heathen and lived far away and therefore we rarely bothered about them unless we happened to write about the Opium War or the sack of Peking by the Allies, when we gave them half a preliminary page.

Gradually, however, a few people reached the conclusion that this idea of making history start on a definite day in. the year 4000+B.C.or the year 2000+B.C.was a little absurd—just a little childish.And they began to dig among the rubbish heaps of Denmark and they lit an occasional candle in the caves of southern France and northern Spain and they took care that the queer statues and the broken skulls that were found in the soil of Austria and Germany were no longer sold to the junk man.Until they found themselves possessed of so much and such highly interesting material that they were forced to confess that those cordially despised ancestors of the glacial age had not been quite such ignorant brutes as had always been supposed and that the much vaunted civilization of the Egyptians and the Babylonians had been merely a continuation of certain forms of culture which had been devised by still other tribes of which every trace had been lost thousands of years before the building of the pyramids.

To-day if it is true(as some learned professors claim)that we have discovered the key to the mysterious inscriptions that were found in and around the caves of southern France, we can extend the period of recorded history by at least 10,000 years and instead of speaking of fifty centuries of human progress, we ought to speak of one hundred and fifty centuries.

But once more I must warn you that this whole field of knowledge is practically unexplored and that we know as little about the state of Europe or Asia in the year 15,000 B. C.as we know about the bottom of the ocean.No sensible person, however, but feels that a perfect knowledge of the bottom of the ocean is merely a question of time;and the same holds tune for the so-called prehistoric era.Give us plenty of serious investigators and a few years of peace(bombs mad shells are not the best things in the world for hidden treasure-rooms filled with earthen pots and pans)and we shall surely possess as much information about the people of the last glacial period as we now have about the subjects of King Tiglath-pileser.

For example, we know from certain prehistoric pictures(and some of our remote ancestors were remarkable artists)that man used to clothe himself in the dried skins of dead animals. But at what precise period he changed his crudely prepared skins into regular leather, that is something upon which we have no definite information but which we can find quite easily by using a little common sense and by inspecting the circumstantial evidence that is at our disposal.

Hides are changed into leather through a process which we call“tanning.”“Tanning,”according to the dictionary,“is a process through which we are able to convert raw hides into leather by soaking them in liquids containing tannic acids or by the use of mineral salts.”

The next question is:“Who were the people of ancient times who knew most about‘converting raw hides into leather by the use of mineral salts'?”and the answer is:“The Egyptians, whose religious convictions obliged them to preserve the bodies of their dead for the greatest possible time and who therefore perfected the art of embalming long before any of their neighbors had ever even thought of such a possibility.”

And when we go to the valley of the Nile, we find as a matter of fact that the Egyptians were expert leather workers centuries before any of the other nations of the ancient world and that the shoemaker's shop(which for all the world looked like one of those quick repair establishments which are so popular in our modern cities)was one of the earliest of the pictures that appeared inside the tombs of defunct Theban kings.

From Egypt the tanner's art then spread to Greece. But the Greeks were people of a delicate taste, and philosophers can discuss the problems of existence just as comfortably and even more comfortably in a woolen tunic than in a leather jerkin.Wherefore the leather industry never made much progress in that land and hastened to Rome, where every other man was a soldier who needed stout sandals and helmet straps and cuirasses, all of which had to be made out of the hides of cows and sheep, duly prepared to withstand the heat of the Sahara and the dampness of Scotland.

In the meantime, in the same land of Egypt, several other skin-substitutes had been carried to a high degree of perfection. In the valley of the Nile, as well as in the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates, people were more in need of protection against the heat than of protection against the cold.Hence at a very early age they tried to find a cooler sort of garment then the skin of a donkey or a goat.And after thousands of years of experiments with different sorts of grass and the leaves of trees, woven into all sorts of garments, they came to the conclusion that the stalk of Linum usitatissimum, which we call“flax,”was best suited for the purpose of future textile experiments.

It seems to be the usual opinion that one-half of the world lived in complete ignorance of what the other half was doing before the introduction of the telegraph and the modern newspaper. The contrary is true.Both the telegraph and the newspaper serve quite as much as means for the propagation of erroneous information as for the spread of reliable news.A hundred centuries ago such highly interesting items as what leading cave-dwellers of the Dordogne had eaten for supper night before last, or what the lake people of Switzerland intended to wear as their fall costumes would hardly have found their way to the tents of the mammoth-hunters of lower Siberia.But whenever anything of real importance happened, whenever a new invention had made its appearance, that increased man's power over nature, it seems that the Chinese knew about it almost as soon as the Cretans or the people of the Atlantic seaboard.I do not mean to imply that all those who heard the news made equally good use of the information.No more than we do today.Indifference and ignorance, but mostly the fear of the unknown, have ever been the enemies of reasonable progress.But that inventions(if they appealed to everybody's interest)could spread with surprising celerity is a fact which the evidence of caves and graves bears out beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Otherwise we should not have found evidences of flax culture along the shores of the Swiss lakes at the same time that it was being grown in the valley of the Nile, for the two places were at different ends of the inhabitable world. But when and where this plant was first raised, that again is one of those things which we shall never be able to find out, and tile same holds true for cotton, of which we first hear in Persia and a few years later in Mesopotamia.

According to Herodotus, cotton had come originally from India, but the planting of the crop and the harvesting had been too complicated to let it attain the popularity of either flax or wool as a suitable material for the manufacture of substitute skins for the masses. This sounds familiar to modern ears, but then the problem is as old as the hills and dates back to the latter half of the Stone Age.

In the beginning“mass production”had hardly been necessary. During the glacial periods people had been forever on the move.Their diet and the conditions under which they lived were worse than those of the poorest slum-dwellers of the year 1928.The majority of the bones we have found in caves mad river beds show signs of those uncomfortable diseases which are inevitable when people sleep in damp quarters and which drag their victims to the grave long before they have reached the age of forty.

Infant mortality seems to have been as high as it was in Russia during the days of the Tsars—a little over 50 per cent. An unusually long or cold winter would depopulate whole countrysides, as it does to-day among the Esqulmaux and some of the Indians of northern Canada.The number of people alive at the same time therefore remained very small;but with the opening up of the large granaries of the Nile and the Euphrates, all tiffs changed.Then at last man could breed at will and large accumulations of human beings could inhabit the same spot.Cities began to develop and the inhabitants of those cities had to be provided with a form of clothing that should at once be cheap and plentiful.

The woolen industry was the answer. Credit for the first woolen garment should undoubtedly go to the peasant who first realized the possibilities of domesticating the doleful creatures which the Romans called“ovis”and which we call“sheep.”This first shepherd must have lived somewhere among the mountains of central Asia.For it was from Turkestan that the wool industry spread westward until by way of Greece and Rome it reached the British Isles, which for over a thousand years were to remain the greatest wool-raising center of the world and were to use this article of export as an economic shillelagh with which to threaten all their neighbors into submission.

For all the rest of the world(and for a long time after its discovery, even the people of America)depended for its supply of raw woolens upon the favor of England. The English knew this and made as shrewd a use of their monopoly as any other country that has its neighbors at its mercy for some staple product of consumption.

The medival ballads and sagas are full of sentimental references to spinning and weaving, but they should not close our eyes to the fact that the innocent though fleecy lamb has caused quite as much blood to be spilled as half a hundred diamond mines or oil wells.

In this particular wool had a very different record from another substitute for the skin which was of even more modest origin. I mean the silk spun by a miserable worm with the grandiloquent name of Bombyx mori.

The appearance of some substance like silk upon the markets of that part of the world devoted to Vanity Fair was, of course, unavoidable. For man not only is a lazy creature but also is incredibly vain.What would be the use of having money in one's purse if one could not provoke the envy of the neighbors by a display of rich and rare apparel?When all the world goes forth dressed in linen and woolens, there is not much fun in belonging to the woolen-brigade oneself.No, the poor rich were sadly pressed and had to choose between discovering a new but expensive way of keeping themselves warm or going about without any clothes at all.

At that very moment the Chinese insect came to their rescue, for in those ancient days its product was worth its weight in gold.

Bomyx mori hailed from Asia. His cradle stood in the far eastern corner of Asia and to the Chinese belongs the honor of having been the first to recognize his eminent services to the cause of beauty and civilization.They were so proud of their discovery that they declared it to be of divine origin and according to tradition, no one less than the lovely Si-lung, the wife of the famous emperor Huang-ti(who lived more than a thousand years before Moses)was the first to make a scientific study of the famous little creeping creatures whose tiny glands eject almost a thousand yards of silken thread when the time has come for them to retire into the privacy of their cocoons.

And so delighted were the sons of Han with the labors of their beloved empress that they decided to keep the manufacture of silk a holy secret. In this they were successful for more than twenty centuries.Then the Japanese sent a delegation of Korean traders to the Holy Empire who induced a few Chinesegirls to come to Japan and teach their cousins the noble art of silk weaving.

A short time afterwards a Chinese princess, hiding the seed of the mulberry tree and the eggs of Bombyx mori in her silken headdress, smuggled the precious treasure out of China mad carried it to India. From there began its victorious westward voyage.

The inevitable Alexander the Great seems to have heard of it during his famous eastern campaign. The equally inevitable Aristotle mentions the worm.A few centuries afterwards those Roman ladies of fashion, whose husbands could afford this smart luxury, always wore silk.

But silk remained almost as rare as platinum is to-day until the end of the sixth century of our era, when two Persian monks were able to smuggle a small colony of silkworms, carefully hidden in a bamboo tube, past the Chinese frontier guard. They carried their contraband in triumph to the Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire in Constantinople and that city then became the center of the European silk trade.

When the Crusaders plundered that holy site, they filled their trunks with hales of stolen silk and in this way, almost thirty centuries after its invention by the Chinese, the silk industry was introduced into the western half of Europe. Even then silk remained a great luxury and it was a matter of pride for a Burgundian prince that his daughter's dowry contained“a pair of real silk stockings”and even 600 years later, a silly and vain woman like the Empress Josephine could Practically ruin her husband by the large number of silk hose which she saw fit to order while he had gone forth to conquer Europe.

This situation was bound to come to an end when every woman began to feel that she, too, bad the right to dress herself like the wife of the Emperor of the French. From that moment on there were not enough silkworms on the whole of the planet to supply the demand of the new industrial democracy.The ever obliging chemists were then called upon to fill the void.They set to work and soon favored us with an artificial form of silk which was made out of the same substance as our modern paper.It was rather terrible stuff and it would not last.But in an age of quick turn-over that worried very few people and nowadays women go about dressed becomingly in garments made out of wood.So much for the different materials which were used as substitutes for the cowhide of our earliest ancestors.These materials have varied greatly, in cost and in texture and in art, but it is a curious fact that the basic idea underlying our wearing apparel has not changed at all since the day when the first man robbed a horse of its skin and used it for the purpose of making his own hide feel more comfortable.

Recently, however, the terrific extreme of cold to which aviators who fly at high altitudes are exposed, has led to the invention of“flying suits”which are kept at an even temperature with the help of a small electric battery.

The invention of even smaller batteries, which can be carried in our vest-pockets, will probably revolutionize the clothing industry before the end of another fifty years. Then, instead of borrowing each other's overcoats, we shall drop in at the house of a friend to ask him to let us recharge our battery, while we smoke a cigarette before his electric grate.

To-day that sounds slightly absurd, but I am not a very old man and yet, when I was young, we would have roared with laughter if some one had suggested that in the year of our Lord 1928 every citizen would be racing around in his own little private locomotive. And so why not expect a coatless age that shall save us from carrying an extra burden of cowhide or coonskin and shall do away with the insufferable nuisance of the cloak-room brigands?

A pious wish.

May it soon come true!

And now for another invention which is also closely connected with man's desire to increase the power of resistance of his own skin, but an invention of quite a different sort.

It would be easy to say that this, too, had been the result of an attempt to protect the human body against heat and cold, but this would not be entirely true. Other elements entered into the making of that curious substitute for the skin which we call a house.Chief among those influences was the habit of all mammals to care for their young for a longer period of time than any of the other animals.For this purpose they needed a safe spot where the whole family could be kept together for two or three months and where they could be taught the rudiments of their papa's and mamma's profession until they were old enough and big enough to set up in business for themselves.

At first they found desirable quarters ha hollow trees or inside those caves that had been formed through the action of the water and had become free for occupancy when the oceans receded and the rivers were confined to narrow beds that lay from thirty to forty feet below their ancient levels.

But these primitive homes were not very attractive. They were filled with millions of bats, for daylight rarely penetrated into these dark grottoes.What was much worse, saber-toothed tigers and gigantic bears, belonging to a species now extinct, also considered themselves extremely desirable tenants and the mixtures of human skeletons and animal bones which we find deep in the gray dust of those cavities tell grewsome stories of the desperate battles that were then fought for a dwelling-place in which to-day we would hardly stable our pigs.

Caves, therefore, did not remain popular very long. A few of them were retained as places of worship, but the vast majority were given up as homes just as soon as some one had discovered how to make himself a substitute cave, or, as we would now say, just as soon as he had built himself a“house.”

In his subsequent search for protection from cold and heat, man has devised some exceedingly strange contraptions. In one part of the world he has constructed houses out of square blocks of ice.In other parts he has woven his shelter out of the branches of trees and has covered them with grass and with leaves.

The most primitive house of all was the lean-to. It has survived as a makeshift for hunters suddenly overcome by nightfall, and as the only place of residence of certain of the least civilized natives of South America and Australia.

Next came the houses made out of baked mud and covered with straw. Then the house with the rough wooden frame.This developed into the so-called pile-dwelling of which we have found remains in many parts of the world, and which is still in common use in certain tropical regions well provided with lakes and rivers.

It used to be thought that these houses on stilts had been constructed mainly for the purpose of safety. But there was another consideration which made people take to the water.One of the first evidences of a beginning sense of decency(which really means a beginning sense of civilization)is a desire for the cleanliness of one's own person and of one's clothes and immediate surroundings.Europe is apt to laugh at us in America for our insistence upon bathrooms and sewers, and perhaps we sometimes overdo the business a little.Athens was no mean city, although the pigs in the streets were also the garbage collectors, and medival Paris made certain very definite contributions to knowledge and art without wasting much time or money upon the problems of sanitation.Nevertheless, other things being equal, it is more agreeable to live in a country that prides itself upon its neat back yards then in a region where family and fertilizer dwell happily together underneath one and the same roof.

People seem to have known this 20,000 years ago as well as they do to-day and those who were more squeamish than the others began to build their houses fifty or a hundred feet from the shore. The roof overhead protected the lodgers against the sun and the rain, while the waters underneath acted as a dump-heap and the little fishes played the rle of White Wings—a truly ideal combination.

This was a great improvement upon what had gone before, but people were still forced to share the same barracks for the sake of greater safety. However, as the problem of survival had become a little less urgent, they took a second step forward and discovered the charm mad the spiritual advantages of privacy.

For privacy is one of the greatest of all human goods, hut unfortunately it comes high. It is a luxury which only the very rich can afford.Nevertheless, the moment a family or a nation has reached a certain point of well-being, it immediately clamors for the sovereign right to be alone.And that is the way individual houses came to be built.

During such periods of affluence, people would no more think of sharing each other's homes than we would think of sharing each other's overcoats or toothbrushes. Now and then, as in ancient Rome, whenever too many slaves had gathered together on too small a spot, the inevitable tenement houses made their appearance.But the people who crowded together in the dark dungeons which the Romans thought good enough for the poor peasants who had come to the big city in the hope that there they would be less miserable than on their war-stricken farms, never liked those suffocating barracks and never took root ha the slums.Just as soon as they could, they went back to the“onefamily house.”

During the Middle Ages in certain parts of Europe the respect for a man's living quarters became so great that“My house is my castle”was more than a mere phrase. It was a political program and stood writ into more than one Great Charter.

But our own modern times, by erecting vast workshops near the mouths of convenient coal mines or along the banks of profitable harbors, have forced the people to return to the mode of living that was originally practiced by the cave-dwellers but was given up by them as unworthy of decent human beings. As a result, the big cities of the West have become gigantic accumulations of artificial skins, piled one on top of another without the slightest respect for the sacred right of privacy of the individual and offering the average citizen as much seclusion as that enjoyed by a sardine.

Fortunately a great change is coming over the world. Everywhere people are in open rebellion against the degradation of the human ant-heap.Most families are still too poor to afford more than a couple of rooms in a stone or wooden five-decker, and they must share their sleeping and eating quarters with several hundred perpendicular neighbors.But those who can do so have developed a novel scheme of living which is vastly superior to that of their grandparents and which makes them the equals of certain sorts of birds.They migrate.They have two sorts of shelter.One is located in semi-tropical regions where they can spend the winters, duly protected against the rigors of the north wind.The other is built amidst the forests of the North, where they can escape from the sultry heat which during the summer months turns the sky-scraper-lined streets of our cities into thoroughfares of Hades.

At present it seems only a dream that some day practically all of mankind will be able to move up and down with the seasons. But in America that dream is fast becoming realized by an ever increasing number of people.

Ten thousand years from now it may appear to our descendants that we of the twentieth century, at least in the matter of mere living, were still contemporaries of the lake-dwellers and the cavemen and the ruins of New York and Chicago will convince them that those rubbish heaps of stone and steel were probably constructed during the latter half of the Stone Age.

It was one thing to find a shelter against the snow and the rain, but it was not quite so easy to keep those shelters warm.

Hence the invention of the house was closely followed by the invention of the fire as a means of keeping warm. Open fires, the original form of heating, have survived until our own day, but now they are used chiefly for ornamental purposes, for they are quite as uncomfortable in the year 1928 as they were in the days when they also served to prepare the daily dish of fried mammoth steak, burning one's toes and allowing one's back to freeze as unconcernedly as if there were no fire at all.

The crude ovens of some of the early Scandinavian tribes show that even then people were looking for something a little more practical than a mere log.

Unfortunately, the Egyptians and the Babylonians, the most intelligent among the ancient inventors, lived in such agreeable climates that they did not have to bother about stoves. But the Greeks, who, like sensible people, knew that high thinking cannot exist, together with uncomfortable living, seriously put their minds to the task of devising a more satisfactory method of heating and bethought themselves of hot air as a means of keeping their substitute skins at an even temperature.

The palace of Cnossos(the capital of Crete, which ruled the eastern part of the Mediterranean a thousand years before the birth of Christ)was provided with radiators. As for the Romans, who, like all true Mediterraneans, abhorred the cold, they arranged their houses in such a way that all the floors and the walls could he heated by means of a stove that stood outside the premises and was kept at full blast by a couple of slaves who acted as furnace-men and saw that there was a steady and even flow of hot air throughout the premises.

During the third and fourth and fifth centuries, however, when Europe was overrun by savages from the heart of Asia who had a deep contempt for what they called“softness”(the same“softness”that had kept them outside of Roman walls for more than 600 years),comfort—in the Greek and Roman sense of the word—disappeared from the face of the earth. The majority of the old Roman houses went to ruin.Temples were used as stables for horses and oxen.The former summer residences of Roman patricians were carted away to be turned into fortifications.Old theaters were transformed into miniature villages.And the radiator-systems of the senatorial villas were allowed to go to pieces.

With a return of law and order, people once more moved into houses of their own;but for more than a thousand years they either froze altogether or tried to keep their rooms warm with the help of braziers filled with charcoal, a method of heatlng which merely accentuated the cold and forced them to keep their hats and coats on even when they went to bed.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, conditions were almost as bad. It is very pleasant to read about the glories of the great Sun King.But we envy His Majesty a little less ardently when we realize that, although he was considered the richest and most powerful man of his time, the good king spent his days in a palace that could not possibly be kept warm, that the stewed fruit froze on his own dining-room table, and that his courtiers, when they decided to wash themselves(which was rarely),were obliged to attack the water pitcher with an ice pick.

Finally, as a supposed improvement upon the charcoal brazier, some one returned to the open fireplace which had already been old stuff in the glacial epoch. But this time it was provided with a chimney, a specially constructed shaft which was supposed to convey the smoke from the grate to the outer air by way of the roof.

At first the chimney was merely a hole in the wall itself, but at the beginning of the sixteenth century(after 300 years of experiment and failure)we hear at last of regular chimneys which looked like those we use to-day and which were capable of causing sufficient draught to take care of almost any fire.

Even then this method of keeping the substitute skin warm was far from satisfactory, and during the next ten generations both pauper and prince continued to choke and freeze in rooms which to-day could be kept comfortable by one or two fair-sized radiators.

Finally, during the last quarter of the last century, we returned to the ways of the Romans and once more learned how to keep our houses warm with the help of steam and hot air.

How long the present method of protecting our supplementary skin with the help of furnaces will last, I don't know, but probably not for very many more years.

The modern way of heating rooms by means of electricity is much simpler and much less cumbersome than the present system, which presupposes the existence of a more or less complicated hot-air apparatus in the basement and calls for a horde of janitors and truck drivers.

At present the problem is merely a matter of cost. As soon as we shall have invented a way to make electricity a great deal more plentiful and a great deal less expensive than it is today, we shall be able to do away with the coal man and the furnace man and the snorting oil heater and the smelly oil stove and the unsafe gas stove.Thereafter the mere turning of a For switch will keep our houses and churches and our public buildings at an even temperature, both summer and winter.

But before I finish this chapter, I must say a few words about another invention which is intimately connected with the business of keeping warm. I mean the holy art of making fire.

The first fires which man used to warm himself were undoubtedly stolen from a tree which had been hit by lightning. But forest fires do not last forever.And they rarely occur in the middle of the winter, when the demand for protection is at its highest.

Then some bright genius(all honor to his memory!he probably was a priest entrusted with the sacred fire upon which the lives of the community depended)discovered that friction would cause heat. It must have happened very long ago, for when man at last appears upon the historical stage, he already knew how to make fire by means of rotating a stick rapidly through a narrow groove cut into a second piece of wood.

A little later, when people commenced to manufacture stone implements, they noticed that when two stones were violently hit together, they produced sparks which could be caught quite easily by a handful of dry moss, which would then start a small conflagration.

This humble instrument, consisting of a fire-stone and a piece of metal, has had a long life. It has been adapted for all sorts of purposes.It gave us the flintlock gun, and finally it gave us our matches.

The tinder-box, with which our grandpapas lighted their pipes, was a complicated affair and not at all handy when one was obliged to make a fire in a hurry. It was necessary to invent something a little more practical, and in every town of the old and the new world people were puttering with chemical substances that should do the job of the cumbersome finder-box.

During the latter halt of the seventeenth century, the first varieties of“Lucifers,”or light-bearers, were actually invented. They consisted of small bits of phosphorus which were struck with a stone until they ignited scraps of wood which had been soaked with sulphur and which were then used to light the stove.They were, however, very smelly and rather dangerous and so they never became popular.

But in the year 1827 an English druggist by the name of John Walker invented a“friction match”which would work without setting the house on fire. He called them“congreves”in honor of Sir William Congreve, the man who during the Napoleonic wars had gained great popularity as the father of the famous“war rockets”and who was a pioneer in the general field of fireworks.

Twenty years later a Swede by the name of Lundstrm, from Jnkping, found a way of reducing the size of the friction matches until they became the“pocket matches”—those little bits of red wood with yellow heads with which we have been familiar all our lives.

Conservative people of course fought the innovation with bitter violence, among other things upon the rather curious ground that the matches would facilitate the labors of secondstory men. But in the end, the matches won out and they remained triumphant until the Great War, when the prehistoric tinder-and-flint(in a new and handy combination)was once more revived for the benefit of our cigarette-smoking heroes.

A curious turn of the far-famed wheel of progress.

And an indirect compliment to our long-forgotten forefathers.