Of course, these prophecies of the writer’s were made upon a basis of very generalised knowledge.  What can be done by a really sustained research into a particular question—­especially if it is a question essentially mechanical—­is shown by the work of a Frenchman all too neglected by the trumpet of fame—­Clement Ader.  M. Ader was probably the first man to get a mechanism up into the air for something more than a leap.  His Eole, as General Mensier testifies, prolonged a jump as far as fifty metres as early as 1890.  In 1897 his Avion fairly flew. (This is a year ahead of the date of my earliest photograph of S.P.  Langley’s aeropile in mid-air.) This, however, is beside our present mark.  The fact of interest here is that in 1908, when flying was still almost incredible, M. Ader published his “Aviation Militaire.”  Well, that was eight years ago, and men have been fighting in the air now for a year, and there is still nothing being done that M. Ader did not see, and which we, if we had had the wisdom to attend to him, might not have been prepared for.  There is much that he foretells which is still awaiting its inevitable fulfilment.  So clearly can men of adequate knowledge and sound reasoning power see into the years ahead in all such matters of material development.

But it is not with the development of mechanical inventions that the writer now proposes to treat.  In this book he intends to hazard certain forecasts about the trend of events in the next decade or so.  Mechanical novelties will probably play a very small part in that coming history.  This world-wide war means a general arrest of invention and enterprise, except in the direction of the war business.  Ability is concentrated upon that; the types of ability that are not applicable to warfare are neglected; there is a vast destruction of capital and a waste of the savings that are needed to finance new experiments.  Moreover, we are killing off many of our brightest young men.

It is fairly safe to assume that there will be very little new furniture on the stage of the world for some considerable time; that if there is much difference in the roads and railways and shipping it will be for the worse; that architecture, domestic equipment, and so on, will be fortunate if in 1924 they stand where they did in the spring of 1914.  In the trenches of France and Flanders, and on the battlefields of Russia, the Germans have been spending and making the world spend the comfort, the luxury and the progress of the next quarter-century.  There is no accounting for tastes.  But the result is that, while it was possible for the writer in 1900 to write “Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical Progress upon Human Life and Thought,” in 1916 his anticipations must belong to quite another system of consequences.