In nearly every other important line of human needs and desires it will be found that merely tentative efforts have been made by ingenious minds resulting in inventions of greater or less promise. Many of the finest conceptions which have necessarily been set down as failures have missed fulfilling their intended missions, not so much by reason of inherent weakness, as through the want of accessory circumstances to assist them. As in biology, so in industrial progress the definition of fitness appended to the law of the survival of the fittest must have reference to the environment.
A foolish law or public prejudice results in the temporary failure of a great invention, and the inventor's patent succumbs to the inexorable operation of the struggle for existence. Yet, fortunately for mankind, if not for the individual inventor, an idea does not suffer extinction as the penalty for non-success in the struggle. "The beginning of creation," says Carlyle, "is light," and the kind of light which inventors throw upon the dark problems involving man's industrial progress is providentially indestructible.
Twentieth century inventions--as the term is used in this book--are, therefore, those which are destined to fulfil their missions during the ensuing hundred years. They are those whose light will not only exist in hidden places, but will also shine abroad to help and to bless mankind. Or, if we may revert to the former figure, they are those which have not only been planted in the seed and have germinated in the leaf, but which have grown to goodly proportions, so that none may dare to assert that they have been planted for nought. A man's age is the age in which he does his work rather than that in which he struggles to years of maturity. Moore and Byron were poets of the nineteenth century, although the one had attained to manhood and the other had grown from poverty to inherit a peerage before the new century dawned.
The prophetic rôle--although proverbially an unsafe one--is nevertheless one which every business man must play almost every day of his life. The merchant, the manufacturer, the publisher, the director, the manager, and even the artist, must perforce stake some portion of his success in life upon the chance of his forecast as to the success of a particular speculation, article of manufacture, or artistic conception, and its prospects of proving as attractive or remunerative as he has expected it to be. The successful business man no doubt makes his plans, as far as may be practicable, upon the system indicated by the humorist, who advises people never to prophesy unless they happen to know, but the nature of his knowledge is almost always to some extent removed from certainty. He may spend much time in laborious searching; make many inquiries from persons whom he believes to be competent to advise him; diligently study the conditions upon which the problem before him depends--in short, he may take every reasonable precaution against the chances of failure, yet, in spite of all, he must necessarily incur risks. And so it is with regard to the task of forecasting the trend of industrial improvement. All who are called upon to lay their plans for a number of years beforehand must necessarily be deeply interested in the problems relating to the various directions which the course of that improvement may possibly take. Meanwhile their estimates of the future, although based upon an intimate knowledge of the past and aided by naturally clear powers of insight, must be hypothetical and conditional. Unfortunately for the vast majority of manufacturing experts, the thoroughness with which they have mastered the details of one particular branch of industry too often blinds them to the chances of change arising from localities beyond their own restricted fields of vision.