vi
The Vision of a Blind Man
With his sightless eyes he looked into the future
He saw the social and industrial revolution that science could bring about, once people understood its laws, and how these laws could be made to work for them.
There wasn't any popular demand for science in those days; it was considered something absolutely apart from the daily life of people.
Youmans, a practical man who made his dreams come true, had to make people realize a need of which they were unconscious, and then supply that need.
He invented just one device- — the chart or diagram object lesson, in universal use today and as ef- fective as it was when the ^'graphic" brought Youmans into national prominence.
��A color chemical chart invented by a blind man
��Tens of thousands learned the rudiments of chemistry by looking at a color chart devised by a blind man. This revealed, almost at a glance, the whole mechanism of
��chemical combinations, as it was then conceived.
Youmans supplemented this with a text book on chemistry and 150,000 copies were sold.
A friendship and business rela- tion that lasted forty years was begun when the blind man was led into the store of D. Appleton & Co., then on Broadway below the City Hall, to borrow from a book- seller a volume he could not afford to buy and which he could not find in the libraries. Youmans' advice made Appleton's the leading pub- lishers of scientific books in Amer- ica. The editing of scientific books, his own writings, his success on the platform — Youmans was a popular lecturer for seventeen years — did not educate people fast enough to satisfy this man of action.
He could make science under- standable but he could not reach people in suflficient numbers. He wanted to sell science to the whole people.
He knew that what was needed was a magazine. It is the medium that can give national publicity. It has the power of iteration; its value depends upon its success in supplying a human need.
��,
�� �
