Frederick Lewis Allen On Global Trends In Technology: 1952

Frederick Lewis Allen, The Big Change (New York: Harper & Bros.; 1952), p. 196. [American spelling retained.]

‘Like scouts moving before an advancing column of troops, the investigators and engineers of pure and applied science have meanwhile been moving ahead.

For well over a generation, now, the chemists and chemical engineers have been ringing the changes on . . . the idea that “synthetic” materials can do better than merely imitate nature: they can actually improve on nature.

It was before World War II on October 25, 1939, to be exact that they produced the climactic demonstration of this idea; that was when nylon stockings first went on sale.

During the nineteen-thirties and the war years, other pioneers of technology succeeded in adapting the Diesel engine that long-neglected source of power to widespread use on the railroads and in industry.

They developed high-octane gasoline into a plentiful source of power for airplanes. They brought the production of synthetic rubber to a point where it served, not merely as a war substitute, but as a product of continuing value for a nation on wheels.

They found out how to use tungsten-carbide cutting tools for immensely rapid machine-tool operations.

And they made medical history by discovering the merciful possibilities of antibiotics.

‘As for atomic power their most imposing achievement we already have been shown its deadly possibilities; what its beneficent ones may be is still uncertain, in view of the fabulous cost of producing it, but they might well, in time, make man in [Henry] Adam’s words “the child of incalculable power.”’

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