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Page 15
I have been to-day in what is to me a kind of heaven below--the
workshop of my much-loved friend, John A. Brashear, in Allegheny, Pa.
He easily makes and measures things to one four-hundred-thousandth of
an inch of accuracy. I put my hand for a few seconds on a great piece
of glass three inches thick. The human heat raised a lump detectable
by his measurements. We were testing a piece of glass half an inch
thick; and five inches in diameter. I put my two thumbnails at the two
sides as it rested on its bed, and could see at once that I had
compressed the glass to a shorter diameter. We twisted it in so many
ways that I said, "That is a piece of glass putty." And yet it was the
firmest texture possible to secure. Great lenses are so sensitive that
one cannot go near them without throwing them discernibly out of shape.
It were easy to show that there is no solid earth nor immovable
mountains. I came away saying to my friend, "I am glad God lets you
into so much of his finest thinking." He is a mechanic, not a
theologian. This foremost man in the world in his fine department was
lately but a "greasy mechanic," an engineer in a rolling mill.
But for elasticity and mobility nothing approaches the celestial ether.
Its vibrations reach into millions of millions per second, and its
wave-lengths for extreme red light are only .0000266 of an inch long,
and for extreme violet still less--.0000167 of an inch.
It is easier molding hot iron than cold, mobile things than immobile.
This world has been made elastic, ready to take new forms. New
creations are easy, for man, even--much more so for God. Of angels,
Milton says:
"Thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest."
No less is it true of atoms. In him all things live and move. Such
intense activities could not be without an infinite God immanent in
matter.
THE NEXT WORLD TO CONQUER
Man's next realm of conquest is the celestial ether. It has higher
powers, greater intensities, and quicker activities than any realm he
has yet attempted.
When the emissory or corpuscular theory of light had to be abandoned a
medium for light's interplay between worlds had to be conceived. The
existence of an all-pervasive medium called the luminiferous ether was
launched as a theory. Its reality has been so far demonstrated that
but very few doubters remain.
What facts of its conditions and powers can be known? It differs
almost totally from our conceptions of matter. Of the eighteen
necessary properties of matter perhaps only one, extension, can be
predicated of it. It is unlimited, all-pervasive; even where worlds
are non-attractive, does not accumulate about suns or other bodies; has
no structure, chemical relations, nor inertia; is not heatable, and is
not cognizable by any of our present senses. Does it not take us one
step toward an apprehension of the revealed condition of spirit?
Recall its actual activities. Two hundred and fifty-eight vibrations
of air per second produce on the ear the sensation we call _do_, or _C_
of the soprano scale; five hundred and sixteen give the upper _C_, or
an octave above. So the sound runs up in air till, above, say,
thirty-five thousand vibrations per second, there is plenty of sound
inaudible to our ears. But not inaudible to finer ears. To them the
morning stars sing together in mighty chorus:
"Forever singing as they shine,
'The hand that made us is divine.'"
Electricity has as great a variety of vibrations as sound. Since some
kinds of electricity do not readily pass through space devoid of air,
though light and heat do, it seems likely that some of the lower
intensities and slower vibrations of electricity are not in ether but
in air. Certainly some of the higher intensities are in ether.
Between two hundred and four hundred millions of millions of vibrations
of ether per second are the different sorts of heat. Between four
hundred and eight hundred vibrations are the different colors of light.
Beyond eight hundred vibrations there is plenty of light, invisible to
our eyes, known as chemical rays and probably the Roentgen rays.
Beyond these are there vibrations for thought-transference? Who
knoweth?
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