344 A Short History of The World quite content to let that profitable creature starve. Inventors and discoverers came by nature, they thought, for cleverer people to profit by. In this matter the Germans were a little wiser. The German " learned " did not display the same vehement hatred of the new learning. They permitted its development. The German business man and manufacturer again had not quite the same contempt for the man of science as had his British competitor. Knowledge, these Germans believed, might be a cultivated crop, responsive to fertilizers. They did concede, therefore, a certain amount of opportunity to the scientific mind ; their public expenditure on scientific work was rela- tively greater, and this expenditure was abundantly rewarded. By the latter half of the nineteenth century the German scientific worker had made German a necessary language for every science student who wished to keep abreast with the latest work in his de- partment, and in certain branches, and particularly in chemistry, Germany acquired a very great superiority over her western neigh- bours. The scientific effort of the 'sixties and 'seventies in Germany began to tell after the 'eighties, and the German gained steadily upon Britain and France in technical and industrial prosperity. A fresh phase in the history of invention opened when in the 'eighties a new type of engine came into use, an engine in which the expansive force of an explosive mixture replaced the expansive force of steam. The light, highly efficient engines that were thus made possible were applied to the automobile, and developed at last to reach such a pitch of lightness and efficiency as to render flight — long known to be pos- sible — a practical achievement. A successful flying machine — but not a machine large enough to take up a human body — -was made by Professor Langley of the Smithsonian Institute of Washington as early as 1897. By 1909 the aeroplane was available for human loco- motion. There had seemed to be a pause in the increase of human speed with the perfection of railways and automobile road traction, but with the flying-machine came fresh reductions in the effective distance between one point of the earth's surface and another. In the eighteenth century the distance from London to Edinburgh was an eight days' journey ; in 1918 the British Civil Air Transport Commission reported that the journey from London to Melbourne, half-way round the earth, would probably in a few years' time be accomplished in that same period of eight days. Too much stress must not be laid upon these striking reductions
