CONCLUSION: THE NEW AGE.
The Age of Material Progress, or the Industrial Age.—History has been well likened to a grand dissolving view. While one age is passing away another is coming into prominence.
During the last fifty years the distinctive features of society have wholly changed. The battles now being waged in the religious and the political world are only faint echoes of the great battles of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. A new movement of human society has begun. Civilization has entered upon what may be called the Industrial Age, or the Age of Material Progress.
The decade between 1830 and 1840 was, in the phrase of Herzog, "the cradle of the new epoch." In that decade several of the greatest inventions that have marked human progress were first brought to practical perfection. Prominent among these were ocean steam navigation, railroads, and telegraphs.[1] In the year 1830 Stephenson exhibited the first really successful locomotive. In 1836 Morse perfected the telegraph. In 1838 ocean steamship navigation was first practically solved.
The rapidity with which these inventions have been introduced into almost all parts of the world, partakes of the marvellous. During the last fifty years the continents have been covered with a perfect network of railroads, constructed at an enormous cost of labor and capital. The aggregate length of the world's steam railways in 1883 was about 275,000 miles, sufficient, to use Mul-
- ↑ Ploctz in his Epitome of History, instructively compares these inventions to the three great inventions or discoveries—the magnetic needle, gunpowder, and printing—that ushered in the Modern Age.
