I
A LONE PIONEER
Half a century has passed since Henry Ford's attention was attracted to a contrivance called "a silent gas engine." A German named Otto was the inventor, and a description of the primitive affair in an English magazine caught the eye of the Michigan farm boy, who had now become a machinist in Detroit. He got a chance to repair an Otto engine at the Eagle Iron Works in 1885. The dissection of that single-cylinder machine, run by illuminating gas, marked the start of patient investigations which were to launch the era of motor transport. It marked, also, the beginning of the fifty years which we of today appraise as the period most productive of scientific achievement in the world's history.
Along with the gasoline engine, the automobile and good roads, our generation has seen the conquest of the air, the development of radio and motion pictures, the increase of safeguards for sea travel, the perfection of farming machinery, the upheaval of autocratic governments, and, perhaps most important of all, the spread of education through which the minds and hearts of men are diverted into new channels of thought and feeling. Progress in invention and industry has withstood wars and panics, has defied the periodic hysterias afflicting humanity in their wake.
