The poet may sing about the“light winged foot”(Shakespeare hassomething to say upon the subject in“Romeo and Juliet”),but to the average quadruped and biped thc foot has ever been a sore subject. Painfully exposed to every sharp stone and thorn, forced to carry all sorts of burdens and gallop or trot or swing its owner to safety, thc foot has always been one of the most vulnerable parts of the body.Wherefore, man, as soon as he had consciously ceased to be an animal, bethought himself of ways and means to multiply and augment the powers of his slow-plodding hind-paws and let an obliging substitute perform some of the thousands of tasks which thus far had depended for their fulfillment upon the soles of his aching feet.

In the beginning, of course, no one was ever in a hurry. The idea of“time”is of very recent origin.Primitive people are aware of only a few outstanding facts.They knew that day follows night and that night follows day and that a period of warm and wet weather is invariably succeeded by a period of cold and dry weather.

But the modern notion of time as a substance which is wellnigh tangible, which can be converted into definitely definable quantities of labor, which can be revaluated in terms of profit and loss—why, it would have made the people of 15,000 years ago roar with laughter. A Bushman listening to the theories of Albert Einstein would not have been more surprised mad bewildered than a citizen of the Stone Age receiving instructions in the use of a watch or a fide chart.

The element of speed, therefore, unless pursued by an enemy, did not enter into the calculations of our earliest ancestors. But even Pithecanthropus erectus had a back, and that back had to be supported by two feet.

It did not matter to him how many hours or days or weeks it took him to go from one spot to another, but it did make a difference(and a very considerable difference)how much he had to exert himself, how many blisters he got on the soles of his feet, how many rivers he had to wade through, how badly his legs were lacerated by the thorns of the underbrush.

And the search for the multiplied foot began almost as soon as the search for the multiplied hand and on the whole with a greater degree of success. For even some of the humblest animals had learned that it was possible to make certain other animals do what one did not care to do one's self;and following their intelligent example, man at a very early stage in his development enslaved a number of his fellow mammals and used their feet as substitutes for his own.

The horse was among the first to succumb. Once astride his broad back, a man could cover vast distances with a minimum of effort and a maximum of comfort.But it took considerable skill to manage one of these animals and the average person was obliged to walk if he wanted to go from one place to another and be sure that he would get there without breaking his neck.

But walking was not such terrible punishment as long as people lived like the beasts of the field and had not yet accumulated any private possessions. As soon, however, as man had become sufficiently civilized to accumulate a few household goods, he became the slave of his riches and had to carry them around on his back wherever he went.He very soon discovered that one can move heavy loads much more easily by pulling them than by hoisting them to one's back, and when this fact had been definitely established, the traction problem underwent a complete change.It was long before the whole of the planet could boast of a single road, but the glacial period, with its unlimited snowfields, offered excellent opportunities for making experiments with sledges—flat pieces of wood dragged by human beings or by reindeer.

As time went on, the flat piece of wood was provided with runners. At first these were made out of bone.When metal came into general use, the bone was discarded for iron and tinally for steel.But the sleigh retained its original prehistoric form longer than almost any other bit of human machinery.Even long after the invention of the wheel, the sleigh was able to hold its own, and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries practically all the hauling in the big commercial centers was done by means of sledges.For wheels were too expensive and it was.cheaper to kill a few extra horses than go to a cartwright and let him make a regular wagon.

Where strands the statue dedicated to the memory of the man who invcnted the wheel?

He was one of the greatest benefactors of the human race and no one ever gives him a thought.

To us, of course, what he did seems very simple. Was there ever a time when man had not yet thought of the carrying possibilities inherent in round discs of wood?

Yes, indeed!Not only was there such a time, but there were vast groups of human beings who never discovered the wheel during all the thousands of years they spent on this earth. Our own Indians were ignorant of the existence of the wheel.The carriages of their Spanish conquerors impressed them quite as much as their blunderbusses.Yet the American Indian was no fool.His brain was just as good as that of his European contemporaries.He did marvelous things within the field of mathematics.He was a better astronomer than the Egyptiarts and the Greeks.But he never thought of the possibility of making himself a wheel, and it may have been one of the reasons why he had lagged behind and fell such an easy victim to the men from the east.

Our museums contain what are said to be the oldest forms of wheels which were found in the graves of defunct Egyptian rulers. Babylonian sculptures show us bearded potentates hunting ferocious lions from the safe vantage points of small armored rickshaws.Homer juggles with carts as he juggles with kings.The vehicles of the Scriptures do not content themselves with the highroads of this earth, but boldly burst forth, into the clouds and storm the pinnacles of Paradise.Indeed, the whole history of ancient times is thickly interwoven with legends about fiery chariots and heavenly wagons, and whenever people wished to render particular homage to one of their gods they depicted him as a dare-devil driver on board a golden cariole, offering to race the sun or steal the moon or do whatever took the greatest amount of skill with horses and with wheels.

It is doubtful whether those earliest carts were ideal instruments of locomotion. People rarely used them unless they were obliged to do so through sickness or old age.Whenever possible, they stuck to the backs of horses and mules.Then came the period of neglect, which followed in the wake of the disintegration of Rome.when the wagons were deprived of those roads without which they could not possibly operate.Then, things on wheels became great curiosities-expensive luxuries like private yachts or special trains.Finally in many parts of Europe they disappeared altogether until well into the sixteenth century, when the revival of the overland trade caused a demand for more efficient methods of transportation.Then at last the old Roman wagons made their reappearance upon the highroads of Europe and the pack-horse, the common carrier of the Middle Ages, no longer sounded his tinkling bell through the narrow thoroughfares of the Swiss villages.But no sooner had the lumbering drays begun to move the spices and textiles from East to West than we hear of efforts to make them a little less dependent upon the endurance and good will of donkeys and mules.It was the day when sailing vessels were beginning to replace the ships moved by the oars of galley-slaves.The obliging wind was doing wondrous things on the waters.Why not give it a chance on dry land?

A clever Fleming tried to combine the idea of vessel and cart and erected a sail upon his four-wheeled vehicle. The thing worked.It worked wonderfully well, but only in one direction.It refused to tack.And it went to the scrap-heap together with several other futile attempts to make the wheels of wagons go round by means of man power.

But for hundreds of years they were unsuccessful. Then at last some one thought of the possibility of moving the multiplied foot by means of the multiplied hand.It is not pleasant to reflect that the first combination of the two was constructed for the benefit of that other form of the augmented hand, which was known as the cannon.But that is the way it happened.

In the year 1769 a Frenchman by the name of Cugnot came lumbering down the road of Versailles with a steam-driven vehicle that had been built for the French War Department to find out whether steam could supplant the horse as a means of moving heavy, guns from one place to another. The Cugnot fire-wagon departed from the current model which had insisted that carriages be built in the image of bipeds or quadrupeds.It did not have two or four wheels, it had three, and it sped along the ill-paved highways at the rate of four kilometers an hour.

It would have been a success if the inventor had been able to keep it on the road. But the creature insisted upon ambling all over the fields and the brakes, too, proved to be far from reliable.And so nothing came of the experiment.It was allowed to be dropped.Soon it was forgotten.

This failure may have been due to the faulty plans of the engineer who constructed the machine, and then again it may have been the result of that strange hostility towards all new ideas which characterizes the average military mind. The French artillery experts declared against the new machine, just as fifty years later an Italian condottiere by the name of Bonaparte was to deride the notion that one could cross the Channel in a steam-driven vessel, and just as our own War Department, seventy-five years later, was to refuse to consider the use of ansthetics in the rield-hospitals because chloroform was declared to be both useless and dangerous.

Needless to say the Sam Wellers of that day, as soon as they heard of the horseless carriage, raised a terrible to-do and from the high perches of their stately coaches they denounced the idea that man could travel under his own steam as an impious defiance of the will of God, which would destroy the crops, would make an end to horse-breeding, and in that way would destroy the Empire.

But born inventors are like born painters or born composers. Those good people(as is often believed by the uninitiated)don't compose or paint or invent or organize trusts because they want to.They perform those manifold tasks because they just can't help themselves.It is in their blood.They have been struck with some incurable form of divine curiosity.It is not necessary for them to live.But it is necessary for them to invent or compose or paint—or to die from sheer discontent and impatience.

Whenever a new idea is in the air, ninety-eight per cent of the people pooh-pooh it and write to the papers and urge the editors to use their great influence to persuade those“so-called”aviators or Arctic travelers or saxophone players or what-have-you from corrupting the youth of the land by their bad example.

Fortunately the other two per cent rarely hear of those noble efforts on the part of their fellow citizens, for whenever they can get hold of a newspaper, they need it to stoke the furnace and keep the family from freezing to death. Even if they were called upon by weeping ladies of some patriotic organization and asked to desist, they would be obliged to disappoint the dear sisters.For most of them are just a tiny little bit crazy.Which is just as well.Would sensible people go through the hardships of our intellectual pioneers?Of course not.And if all this world were composed of normal folk, we should still live among the trees, swinging gayly from branch to branch with the assistance of long, prehensile tails.

It is no more than fair that I should make this little detour fight here, for I am about to tell you of the invention of another sort of multiplied foot which was fought harder and more bitterly than almost anything else and which goes by the name of the railroad train.

Richard Trevlthick, William Hedley mad George Stephenson are the people who are generally supposed to have been responsible for the invention of the Iron Horse. They lived in an age of respectability, snuff and slow means of transportation, and they were made to feel that their enthusiasm was entirely out of place in a country of decent Christians.

To-day all three have statues. But while they were still on this earth, the respect of the community showed itself in slightly different forms, such as cat-calls, diverse specimens of defunct cabbages and Acts of Parliament interfering with their nefarious designs upon the tranquillity of country estates.When even the latter(the Acts of Parliament)proved to be of no avail, committees of learned professors were instituted to predict(at the hand of innumerable blue-prints and statistics)that the idea of steam-traction was foredoomed to failure and that money thus invested might as well be thrown into the Thames.And when finally the first road of iron rails had been completed, another dozen years of wrangling and arguing and persuading passed before Stephenson was able to convince his directors that the engine should be placed on wheels and should be part of the moving body rather than a stationary affair at one end of the road arranged to haul the carriages forward and backward by means of a complicated system of ropes.

That was in the year 1825.

The idea of a machine that should be driven by means of regular explosions occurring in its“innards”is a very old one. The Greeks had speculated about the possibilities of such a substitute for the hand.But they had never been able to make one.The trouble was that they did not know enough.They were possessed of brilliant minds but they had not yet accumulated a sufficient number of scientific facts, and so they remained the prime“guessers”of the old world who“guessed”at everything from statecraft to motor cars and often“guessed”pretty nearly right.

They were followed by the good pious burghers of the Middle Ages, who were equally indifferent to“knowing”and“guessing”as long as they were allowed to“believe.”When after years of painful experiment it was established beyond the shadow of a doubt that a too thorough reliance upon the joys of the future was apt to lead to a little more Hell-in-the-present than was quite comfortable, the work of the old Hellenes was continued where they had left off and the internal combustion engine was once more taken out of its Attic shed and was made an object of serious study.

Huygens, the Dutch physicist, played with the idea of a machine that should be moved by the explosion of small amounts of gunpowder. While he was trying out a variety of gunpowder samples, the royal house of Sweden bought itself a wagon“driven by a mechanical contrivance”(details unknown)which had been constructed by a Nuremberg watchmaker.The old bus, however, proved much too speedy for the roads, for it often made as much as a kilometer and a half per hour and could go on forever.A few years later, no one less than great Isaac Newton, the man who discovered the law of gravity, occupied himself with a car that was to be driven on the principle of the rocket.

But it was not until the middle of the last century, when the explosive qualities of distilled earth oil had been definitely established, that the automobile(in its modern form)made its first appearance. Both France and Germany were busy with experiments when the war of 1870 broke out and caused a slight delay.But fifteen years after this senseless and disastrous struggle, horseless carriages, not moved by steam but by“explosion motors,”were beginning to make their appearance upon the European highroads and were at once the object of marked attacks.The railroad companies completely forgot what had happened to themselves only a short while before and denounced these roughriders of the highroads as“enemies of the public safety.”Private citizens shouted loudly about the rights of pedestrians, and parliaments as usual made themselves conspicuous by passing laws which forced the owners of cars to have their vehicles preceded by guards bearing lighted lanterns or red flags.

All these inventions which served to multiply the power of the foot contributed their share towards that great revolution in the social fabric which commenced the day James Watt took out a patent for his improved steam engine. They completely changed the old idea of distance.They decreased the size of the globe by at least sixty per cent and gave the world a new conception of the word“speed,”which made the human foot a most unsatisfactory instrument of transportation, a slow and plodding creature, a sort of snail with brains.For up to the time of the invention of the locomotive and the motor-car, the foot, at best augmented by a pair of skates(originally consisting of a pair of bone runners, but afterwards made of steel)had been our sole standard of velocity and what it had accomplished was nothing to boast about.Now, in less than a hundred years, we had placed ourselves at the head of the procession.We may not always know where we are going at such terrific speed, but, anyway, we are no longer sitting still.

And what was happening on the shore was soon afterwards duplicated on the water. Man is essentially a land animal, but he has been forced by hunger and by greed(and occasionally by curiosity)to spend a great deal of his time upon the water.

And the different substitutes for the feet, which I have just enumerated, were of no earthly use to him when the shortest route from one point to another lay by way of a fiver or a brook. If the river were not too deep, he could wade through it or let his horse carry him across.But such a procedure inevitably meant the reloading of whatever cargo the traveler was transporting, and a lot of time was lost and it was felt that some method should be devised by which people could get from one shore to the other without being under the necessity of getting their feet wet.

That is how bridges happened to be invented.

The first bridge was merely a dead tree that lay across a ravine and that was made passable by the flattening of the upper side. Trees, however, are necessarily limited in length, while rivers are not necessarily limited in width.Besides, horses and carts could not use these wobbly and narrow passageways and quite often wanderers slid down into the stream and were drowned.

The Romans finally solved the difficulty. The Egyptian and Babylonian engineers had been quite as intelligent as their Roman successors, but they rived along the shores of rivers that were really small oceans and so wide that no one had ever dreamed of tackling them.Besides, those nations did not rule the greater part of the inhabited world and had no need of rapid and uninterrupted means of communication between one part of their empire and the next.

The Romans, on the other hand, administered hundreds of thousands of square miles of territory and, having at their disposal only a limited number of soldiers, they were dependent upon their roads and their bridges to carry them from one end of their dominions to another with the least possible delay. The bridges they constructed were, therefore, most of them military bridges and not meant for commerce, and not until the latter half of the Middle Ages did the architects and the engineers begin to devote some attention to the ruins of the Roman structures and restore them according to the needs of the hour.

To-day with the ever increasing pressure of business, even the best intentioned of these suspended highways cannot always handle all the traffic that is being hastened from one city to another. Then the bridge(the foot)becomes a tunnel and dives underneath the bed of the river and reappears again on the other side with practically no interruption of the even flow of business.

So much for watery obstacles of a minor nature. But there was the sea and the sea refused to let itself be conquered quite so easily and offered a much more difficult problem.One could of course imitate the fishes and the seals and swim, but the human body can stay in the water for so long and no longer.It was necessary to invent something entirely different to act as a foot-on-the-water.Animals overcome by a flood and riding to safety on the trunk of a dead tree may have suggested the idea of the first boat.But a log was a very unmanageable craft and it would upset at the slightest provocation.Therefore people dug a hollow space in the center with the help of a smoldering fire and stone scrapers and turned it into a regular strip which they propelled with the assistance of a long pole.And one day, after years of experiment, the prehistoric world was startled by the news that a man had crossed the English Channel in a boat.No doubt he was considered a much greater hero than Lindbergh, and in a way he was quite as important.

Then came the moment(one of the greatest moments in our history)when an intrepid sailor fastened the skin of a dead animal to a piece of wood, hoisted his cross beam to another piece of wood, planted his mast in the how of his vessel and proudly let the wind blow him to his destination. When he finally crossed the English Channel in this ocean greyhound, I am sure that the people on both sides of that broad stretch of water felt convinced that the millennium was now close at hand and that it would be difficult to carry human ingenuity much further.

But it was only a beginning. For now the hand was coming to the assistance of the foot.The oar was invented.It made a deep impression.People looked at it and said that the ship was plowing its way across the sea.It made navigation a much safer business than it had ever been before.It relieved the sailors from anxiety about the winds.Provided one had enough slaves, one could predict with great nicety when one would arrive at a given spot.

And then out of the oar grew the rudder, which did not make its appearance until several thousand years after the invention of the first vessel. When rudders were introduced, ships still had the shape of square floating boxes and they were the same fore as aft.It was therefore necessary, to have one rudder at the bow and another one at the stem.These rudders were nothing but enlarged oars and they were used in the same way as we use the paddles of a canoe.When ships began to increase their speed, and changed their general shape, the forward oar was omitted altogether and the rudder moved to the end of the stern, where it has remained ever since.

About the same time there was another change in the technique of navigation, due to a very simple device which came to be known as an“anchor”—a Greek word for a“hook.”

The Greeks and Romans had hated the open sea as they had dreaded the snow-clad heights of the Alps and the Thracian mountains. They were church-steeple sailors.When evening came, they simply hauled their vessels on shore and spent the night on dry land.This slow and costly method of peregrination was due to the fact that at night, when there were no stars by which they could set their course, it was impossible for them to lie still without drifting;and once they had started drifting, no one could foretell where they would end.

The anchor, a heavy stone fastened to a rope, was really a hand which reached from the deck of the ship to the bottom of the sea and did away with this difficulty. It kept the craft in place and in that way made it possible for people to undertake longer voyages.

It was considered a most useful sort of multiplied hand and was adopted as a symbol of safety by more than one religious creed.

The sailors were now provided with everything they needed for their simple requirements. But in case of fog they were apt to lose their road and at night when there were no stars they were hopelessly at sea.This difficulty was overcome by the introduction of the compass, which made its appearance(Heaven knows whence)during the first half of the thirteenth century.Thereafter ships could venture forth into the uttermost corners of the Seven Seas and if their captains knew their business, and if their owners had not been too mean when they ordered the vessel to be built, and if the weather had been reasonably good, and the maps had been correct, those early barges often reached their destinations.For a sailing-ship or a galley, even in the hands ofthe most expert navigator, was still a comparatively helpless sort of creature.

An adverse wind meant trouble.

A storm meant the loss of fully fifty per cent of all oars.

The whole problem of navigation, therefore, was reduced to one single problem, how to make the floating foot independent of the wind and of the human hand.

Paddle wheels on both sides of the vessel, moved by human legs, were tried, but they were not a success. As soon, however, as James Watt had perfected his multiplied hand, a steam engine was placed inside the hold of the ship and was used to make the paddle wheels go round.Credit for this invention is usually given to Robert Fulton.But a number of people had been experimenting with“fire-boats”long before Fulton and that enthusiastic young painter was merely a very successful promoter of steam navigation.A dozen years after the end of the great Napoleonic wars, regular lines of steam-driven vessels plied between England and the Continent, and in the year 1838 America and Europe were connected by steamers which took two weeks for a voyage that in former times lasted anywhere from three weeks to three months.

When the ocean racers were introduced some thirty years ago, the multiplied foot had annihilated distance on the waters as it had done on land. There remained only one domain to be conquered—the air.

From the beginning of time people had envied the birds. Their freedom of movement had filled their hearts with justifiable envy.The birds were independent of roads and bridges.Rivers and seas meant nothing to them.They had even solved the problem of cold and heat by migrating from North to South and from South to North with the changes of the seasons.Attempts to imitate the birds in one form or another, therefore, were almost as old as the human race itself mad we find kites mentioned in Chinese histories of forty centuries ago.

But nothing shows quite so dearly how much man wanted to fly as the fact that in every mythology the gods are blessed with the gift of soaring through space.

Nothing, however, was done in a practical way until late in the Middle Ages when the problem of substituting wings for feet was studied quite seriously by our old friend Leonardo da Vinci. He even went so far as to construct a number of flying-machines which worked beautifully on paper, but which invariably refused to leave the earth whenever they were exposed to a practical test.

Nowadays we know why Leonardo was bound to fail. There was nothing the matter with the body of his artificial birds.But the human hand was not strong enough to lift these overgrown kites from the ground.And nothing could be done until the hand should have acquired a thousand times more power than it had in the sixteenth century.

The problem, however, continued to interest people. During the latter half of the eighteenth century, a firm of French paper manufacturers buttoned together a number of sheets of tissue paper, made them into a balloon, filled the thing with hot air and sent it up to the skies before a gaping multitude who promptly attacked the monster when it came down again and dispatched it with their pitchforks.But although man was now on his arial way, he was unable to control the direction in which he was going.

With a favorable wind, he sometimes could use a balloon to travel from one country to another. He even crossed the English Channel.But once in France or Great Britain, he had no means at his disposal to return whence he had come.

The same was true of the soaring machines which were almost as old as the Chinese kites, but which were not made a subject of scientific investigation until about fifty years ago, when steam navigation and railroad trains seemed to have reached the end of their development and when there was another attack upon the skies.

The bird-shaped dinguses with which people began to slide through space in the seventies and the eighties of the last century could keep afloat for quite a long while, but a sudden gust of wind might cause their occupants to break their necks. Furthermore, it was hard to get them started and it was even more difficult to force them to land where one actually wanted to go.And wingèd man remained an idle dream until the manufacturers of those multiplied hands, known as motors, had reduced their product to such small proportions and had made them so reliable that they could be used without any risk of sudden collapse or an abrupt descent to the fields below.

The Wright brothers, so it seemed, were the first to fly. Their first journey lasted only fifty-nine seconds, but the thing had been done, and the rest was comparatively easy.

The inevitable cross-Channel voyage followed soon afterwards, and when Bleriot flew from Calais to Dover, the whole world was convinced that now at last those old enemies of the human race, space and distance, had been successfully defeated and that the people of the earth, united into one glorious brotherhood, would forever after live in peace and harmony.

The purring propellers of the Zeppelins, crossing and recrossing the same English Channel with their deadly cargo of dynamite and poison gas, once more warned us that the human foot, like the human hand, is an instrument that can be used for evil quite as much as for good mad that the Road of Progress takes strange turns, many of which run through the cemetery.

As for the future of the multiplied foot, whether in a modified form, of which as yet we have no conception, it will ever allow us to escape from our planetary prison, that I indeed do not know. But it does not appear to be outside the limits of imminent possibilities.We may have to know a little more about the laws of gravity than we do at present;we may have to discover a great many more things about our nearest stellar neighbors than we know at present;but when we realize in what miraculous way the power of the human hand and foot has been multiplied during only one short century, there is no reason why we should despair and feel that we are doomed to spend all of our days on one and the same speck of dust.

Remember one thing:we may seem to have traveled pretty far during the last five decades, but we are still terribly new at the business of using our brains. And few members of the human race have reached the point where they have the courage of their mathematical convictions.

But give them time.