I am posting now a summary of the chapter LVII of the book above, writen by H.G. Wells and published by Penguin books in 1938. I think is very interesting to know how the investment in research and education can change a country forever. The title of the chapter is:
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MATERIAL KNOWLEDGE.
Throughout the 18th century there was much clearing up of general ideas about matter and motion, much mathematical advance, a systematic development of the use of optical glass in microscope.
Improved metallurgy, affording the possibility of a larger and bolder handling of masses of metal and other materials, reacted upon practical inventions. Machinery on a new scale and a new abundance appeared to revolutionise industry.
In 1825 the first railway, between Stockton and Darlington, was opened. From 1830 onward railways multiplied. By the middle of the century a network of railways had spread over Europe.
The steamboat was a little ahead of the steam-engine in its earlier phases. The first ship using steam (also had sails) to cross the atlantic, was the Savannah(1819), after that the evolution in sea-transport was rapid.
The electric telegraph came into existence in 1835. The first underseas cable was laid in 1851 between France and England. In a few years the telegraph system had spread over the civilised world, and news which had travelled slowly from point to point became practically simultaneous throughout the earth.
Technical knowledge and skill were developing with an extraordinary rapidity and to an extent, measured by the progress of any previous age.
Parallel with this extension of mechanical possibilities the new science of eletricity grew up.Then came eletric light and eletric traction, and the transmutation of forces, the possibility of sending power, that could be changed into mechanical motion or light, or heat as one chose, along a copper wire, as water is sent along a pipe, began to come through to the ideas of ordinary people.
The British and French were at first the leading peoples in this great proliferation of knowledge, but the Germans showed such zeal and pertinacity in scientific inquiry as to overhaul these leaders.
The British science was largely the creation of Englishmen and Scotchmen working outside the ordinary centres of erudition. British universities were at this time in a state of educational retrogression, given over to a pedantic conning of the Latin and Greek classics and French education was dominated by the classical tradition of the Jesuit schools, and consequently it was not difficult for the Germans to organise a body of investigators. And though this work of research and experiment was making Britain and French the most rich and powerful countries in the world , it was not making scientific and inventive man rich and powerful.
In this matter the Germans were a little more wiser, the German businessman had not quite the same contempt for the man of science as had his British competitor. Knowledge, they believed might be a cultivated crop, their public expenditure on scientific work was greater, and this expenditure was rewarded. By the later half of the 19th century, the German scientific worker had made German a necessary language for every science student who wished to keep abreast with the latest work in his area, and in certain branches, particularly in chemistry, Germany acquired a great superiority over its neighbours. The scientific effort of the sixties(1860s) and seventies(1870s) in Germany began to tell after the eighties(1880s), and German gained steadily upon Britain and France in technical and industrial prosperity.
