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Ohio University Libraries, E.W. Scripps Papers, MSS 117, Series 4, http://media.library.ohiou.edu/scripps
Septemba r 27, 1909~ q (
POSSIBLE ORIGINS.
------~-----------
Fortunately for my reputation my disquisitions ,have " : few read-ers.
What I am going towri te a.bout in this is an idea that originated
in my own· bra.in and was notauggested to me by anything that I
have ever react or,beard spoken of. Yet tha idea is so simple and so
natural tha.t I am sure tha.tithas occurred to many I many people of the
present and past ages and I can be pretty nearly sure that the subject
ha.s been written upon; - it only happens that I, in l'frJ limited field of
rea.ding, have not happened upon anything of the kind"E:'
Thirty-seven years ago I thought out and desi~~edJ in my own
mind, a. helicopter flying machine. I designed a model and employed,
in the city of Detroit, a. man named Lynch, who was a skillful meohanic,
to build it. We began work J but were handicapped by two things:
First, I was very poor J and seoond, I was a. moral coward and was afraid
of being laughed at and so I would not tell Lynch or anyone else that
what I was working on was a flying machine. I had no engineering
knowledge and no capacity a.s a. draftsman and Lynch was working in the
dark and could not help me. The work was carried not one quarter
through before it wa.s abandoned.
~ow, today I am reading reports and seeing the publication of
outs of helicopter machines, one of which is a perfect image of that
which I have can-ied in rtrj brain for thirty-seven years. I doubt not
that this same helieopter mechanical idea has suggested itself to the
minds of many run in past times, perha.ps in very remote times; it has
only come to light more in these times because the light gasolane motor
and other rorms of flying machines have induced new discoverers aithe 309
idea. to gq further than I and others have done. A man _ynGw safely
Object Description
| Rating | |
| Title | Disquisition by Scripps, E.W., Possible origins, September 27, 1909 |
| Collection | E. W. Scripps Papers, 1868-1926 |
| Creator/Author | Scripps, E. W. (Edward Willis), 1854-1926 |
| Date Original | 1909-09-27 |
| Subject-LCSH |
Thought and thinking Origin (Philosophy) |
| Is Part Of |
E. W. Scripps Papers, Series 4, Box 01, Vol 02 E. W. Scripps' Writings 1909, Book 2 |
| Collection finding aid | http://www.library.ohiou.edu/archives/mss/mss117.html |
| Call Number | mss117/ser4/box01/book02/309-321 |
| Original Format-AAT | Essays |
| Publisher | Ohio University Libraries. Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections |
| Type | Text |
| Format [IMT] | Application/pdf |
| Physical dimensions | 13 p.; 11 x 8.5 |
| Identifier | ser4_box01_vol02_309-321_possible_origins.pdf |
| Donor | Scripps, Charles E. (Charles Edward), 1920- |
| Rights Information | In the public domain. Unpublished works are under copyright for the life of the author + 70 years |
| Citation | E.W. Scripps Papers, Mahn Center for Archives & Special Collections, Ohio University Libraries |
| Transcript |
Ohio University Libraries, E.W. Scripps Papers, MSS 117, Series 4, http://media.library.ohiou.edu/scripps Septemba r 27, 1909~ q ( POSSIBLE ORIGINS. ------~----------- Fortunately for my reputation my disquisitions ,have " : few read-ers. What I am going towri te a.bout in this is an idea that originated in my own· bra.in and was notauggested to me by anything that I have ever react or,beard spoken of. Yet tha idea is so simple and so natural tha.t I am sure tha.tithas occurred to many I many people of the present and past ages and I can be pretty nearly sure that the subject ha.s been written upon; - it only happens that I, in l'frJ limited field of rea.ding, have not happened upon anything of the kind"E:' Thirty-seven years ago I thought out and desi~~edJ in my own mind, a. helicopter flying machine. I designed a model and employed, in the city of Detroit, a. man named Lynch, who was a skillful meohanic, to build it. We began work J but were handicapped by two things: First, I was very poor J and seoond, I was a. moral coward and was afraid of being laughed at and so I would not tell Lynch or anyone else that what I was working on was a flying machine. I had no engineering knowledge and no capacity a.s a. draftsman and Lynch was working in the dark and could not help me. The work was carried not one quarter through before it wa.s abandoned. ~ow, today I am reading reports and seeing the publication of outs of helicopter machines, one of which is a perfect image of that which I have can-ied in rtrj brain for thirty-seven years. I doubt not that this same helieopter mechanical idea has suggested itself to the minds of many run in past times, perha.ps in very remote times; it has only come to light more in these times because the light gasolane motor and other rorms of flying machines have induced new discoverers aithe 309 idea. to gq further than I and others have done. A man _ynGw safely Possible Origins--2. invest his ti~ and money in a flying machine without being considered a fool or an insane person. That would have been impossible thirtyseven years ~o. For many years past I have been amusing n~self with certain lines of study and thought on subjects scientific. I am not a scientif-ically trained man, but all the sciences attract m.y interest. I can tolerably easily understand what most scientific writers have to say_ I pick up from one writer ruld another little dabs of infonnation and little suggestions, then I amuse myself by exercising my imaginative faculties as well as my logical faculties. About ten years ago I read Prof. Sha,tl"ert s li ttl e book on "The Individual." The reading of this book sup.'..gested to my mind an idea; I do not remember, nor do I believe that Shailer said anything in his book that indicated that he had ever had any idea such as was suggested to me; - he probably had the idea; probably thousands of others had the idea. and proba.bly the idea is as old as culture in the huma.n family. However, I played with the idea and developed in my mind a theory. Some years later the Curies discovered radium and not long after I read an article by Sir William Ramsey concernil1g a thoery of matter, based on data. obtained from the disoovery and investigation of radio-acti vi ty in which was embraced almost identically the same theory that I had some years before formulated in my mind. About two years ago I wrote a disquisition captioned "What is Wealth?" or something of that kind. I pursued a train of thought that led up to the conclusion that there was no such thing as material wealth, and that wealth was simply nothing more than the knowing how to do. A year later I read an article by. Prof. Thorstein Veblen on the subject of capita.l; capitalism and capitalists. In this article Veblen came to 310 Possi bla Origins--3. the same conclusions I did, but instead of using the term of "how to do" he used the word "technology.1I I have cited a few cases where I have been surprised or disappointed in finding that I had originated nothing. I have had a great many other such surprises;- for instance there is a great volume of literature at present on the subject of so-called modern education, denouncing our syst~ and methods. These writers are going over the ground that I went over a number of years ago when I was eonsiderirJt the subject of educating my children very seriously. I then concluded that so far from it being possible for me to benefit my children by sending them to any of the modem schools or colleges I would be doing them a positive injury. Sevelfal years ago, - oh! over twenty years ago - when I was considering the subje~t of takinc~ out life insurance for myself I figured closely on the capital investment; some how or other it came into my mind. at that time that the least stable conmodi ty of all was precious metal&~gold and silver. It was proposed to me that I should take out $100,000 tontine life insurance; I was to pay a premium of some $5,000 per year for twenty years and at the end of tha.t time, if I had been lucky and able to meet rtrf payments of premium, I was to get my money baek plus four per cent interest. I figured at that time that the $100,000 in gold that I was to get at the end. of twenty years would not be worth nearly so much in comnodities as it waS at the time of my putting in the money in the way of premiums. I had no sufficient data at hand to make a correct estimate of the falling value of gold, but some fifteen years of business experience had enable.d me to learn by observation that prices, measured by gold, had been'rising at a very rapid rate which I estimated to :be more .than four per cent. Having come to this conclusion I decided .AI 1 ~'!I Possible Origins--4. that it would not pay me to invest in life insurance t but that it would pay me infinitely better to invest in other commodities. A few months ago I read in The North American Review an ar-ticle on the "Diminishing Dollar." The author of this article had gathered together sufficient data to bolster up his argument that the • price of gold, its value in eonmodi ty exchange, had depreoiated ~+S~n the ten years, 1898 and 1908, by more than four per cent per annum. My own conclusions were that while the author had furnished dataenoug;h to prove conclusively his contention, still his data was so deficient as to cause him to come to a. wrong conclusion, and it appeared to me that full data, properly handled, would prove that the depreciation was more than fonr percent - more nearly eight per cent. But these are only some more cases. I have cited these be-cause I have every reason to believe that what I am going to say about the origin of things is not at all new. I am bound to presume that writer~J ancient and modern,haveexpossd the same idea; however, I do not recall nor do not believe I have ever read or heard anything like .what I-am about to say. These ideas are as much my own personal ~8 if they had never previously existed in another man's mind. Now, here has been the callse.of the origin of my theory: According to the doctrine of evolution every organized living thing, animal ~egeta.ble, has by a process of evolution developed from some one or more original stock or stocks of primitive life cells. Very me..ny and most animals and vegetables that are familiar to us today are known to have bad primitive ancestors much less fully de- . veloped than their present day descendants. To a great extent we have been a.ble tQtrace to the distant pa~t the race history of man hiniself and moat of the present day domestic and wild animals, insects, ff,shes and vegetables. , Possible Origins--5. However, there are certain animals, including man, and many vegetables thatha.l'e not got J:..e~r!!!e.)-~~~~t is impossible to conceive that there ean exist a. gradua.ted system of conneoting links. "'- There are many mental attitudes of man that we cannot concei va of having been the 'reeul t of an orderly mental evolution; but even man can exist and does exist in wha.t is called the wild or natural state. There are~ I believe, however, Bome domesticated animals and vegetables that cannot ex! st without dome sti e care. The horse and the turkey can run wild, but the barnyard fowl cannot revert to nature, that is to a type that could exist without the int.elligent a.ssistance of man. Amongst the vegetable B are the grains J - wheat and Indian earn, there is the orange and even the apple and I believe the olive which, though they may have kindred in the wild state, are so far removed and so far developed in the domestic form that it is impossible to conceive that evolution, tempered and assisted by human culture, could ha~e b~Ought them to their present s~ dur~ng t~t .period of time Wh1Ch 18 covered by any modern con6eptlon~~ culture. A It is possible for us to' form an approximately correct idea of the time beyond which, in the past. there could have existed no such cul ture or oi vilization of man as would have been necessary to produce wheat, Indian' corn and even apples, oranges and olives from some then existing vegeta.ble in the wild sta.te. leay it is possible for us to a.rri ve at this time if our present ideas of the origin of men, or rather our ideas of man's civilization, are correct. My-theory has its fOUD4atioft- on the basis that our present ideas on thissubjeet are a.bsolutely wrong. There have been many a.ttempts to discover a natural and evolutionary or~gi!l of hlmlall religions; these efforts have bea"."l.' and v . • . so weak as to furnish no conclusive evidence- to the miRda >or ordinarily313 Possib~e Origins--6. intelligent men that these religions have not owed their origins to the supernatural. One writer that I know of - Sir William Ramsey - has dealt with this subject in such a way as would indicate that he himself thL~s that there was a human history even before prehistoric times, taking the common view of what the word prehistoric stands for. The idea, at least. that is suggested in one of his articles is that socalled primitive religions existing amongst some of our savages are not sprouting ideas in the minds of undeveloped races of men, but that they are decayed remnants of great religions that were the property of the great ancestors of degenerate descendents. There is something of kin-ship between E&~sey's theorJ of decay and Minot·s theory of death. Both these men are announcing a revolutionary and unevolutionarJ principle. The ordina.ry idea of evolution is that all life is developing upwards and that the weak are growing stronger, the small greater J and that there is a constant change from a homogeneous toward a heterogeneous, and that what is heterogeneous is constantly becoming more heterogeneous, and that the simple is changing from the simple to the complex and from the complex to greater complexity .. It seems to me that both Minot and Ramsey have advanced theories that are the reverse of all this. How do we know that fifty thousand years ago 1 a hundred thousand years ago or several hundred thousand years ago the ea.rth was not peopled..J?y .. ancestors of modern man who were largely composed of beings of -t:::;;::-and more complex illl' .... ••• _Ii organisms and possessed of a civilization far higher than our own and of in.t.e..l. ligence far greater than ours ,and possessing power over nature even far greater in pll'O'por- ~ ,... tIWI.. ~.,~ tion to our power over nature "10@ is the power of modem civili~ ....•... greater than that of t..h e moat primitive savage o.f a.n A frican jungleZ 314 Possible Origins-":7. This is perhaps the way that we come to our conclusion that no a.,,1 w&~ such tmti~sted: From the earliest times, when the earth became habitable, the world has been keeping a historical record of all that has been going on on its surface. By gathering specimens of all the various organisms which have been its guests 8,."Yld preserving them in fossil form t to be kept in such fonn until the world itself should cease to exist as a solid mass evidence has been preserved of the life that t~the earth in preceding ages. The fossil remains of man and other animals and insects are to be found buried at great depths in sed-imentary depoei ts. But there is no perfect chain of links between the present man and the Neanderthal man; other human remains have been found that are perhaps older and perhaps younger than the Neanderthal J but the distance between the Neanderthal man and modem man is at least millions of years. When we co~ up from the deep pits of paleontology to the surface of the earth we find human records that extend back, as compared to geologic ages J to not more than a moment of time. There are the Egyptian pyramids, one of which is supposed to have been built as long ago as nine or ten thousand years; there are earth mounds and rock cairns in Europe and America of very ancient construction.. There are, I have been told, existing in western America evidences of a very ancient civilization in the way of irrigation ditches; the ancientness of this civiliJiation is reveal ad by the fact that since these ditches were built the beds of the streams which once fed them have been lowered by erosion so many feet a.s would have" required ages to have accomplished. Near the ea.rth t 8 surface too, it is argued, that if there had really been a grea.t civilization equalling our own, would be found quarries and ancient mines» the latter of whQj.h might not have'be~n destroyed by erosion even in the period of man~r millions of y~ars. For 315 Possible Origins--8. instance I how many millions of years will be required before the deep mines that are now being worked, in various parts of the world, will have been wiped off the slate by their complete destruction by erosion, so that there will be no evidence of their existence on the earth's surface? No I rea.soning by analogy, there never could have existed a hundred, two or three hundred thousand years ago a civilization similar , to our own. But while I am advancing the theory that there could have been a far higher oi vilization and a far greater race of men I am not arguing that the men of that c1 vilization had a c1v~lization identical to our own, or even similar to our own nor that riJIiF .'.i f.:y had the same pursuits or attacked nature in the same way as men attack it today. It is not only possible but probable that the products of the mines were entirely unnecessary to such a civilization as might have existed and that therefore there would be no reason to look for evidence in earth scarification. We have some historical remains of several ancient civiliza.tions; - we will take two of themj - two of the several that have left architectural monuments in stone, or other durable material: There are the Greek and the Egyptian civilizations. Judging by the mere physical dimensions of the monuments of these two civilizations we would have to argue that the FsJptian civilization was even of a. greater and higher type than that of Greece; we have every reason to believe, however, that the Greek civilization was of a far higher type than that of the Egyptian. Let us take all that is left of the Greek civilization in the way of monuments, and allowing for the possibility of as' great or a greater break-up of organized sooi- ~. ' sty as occurred after the fall of the Boman Empire, and allo19'ing that " this condition could exist for another ten or twenty thousand years, is 316 Possible Origins--9. it not possible, is it not proba.ble, that long before that time has expired that every vestige of material of Greek origin would disappear, and that before that time bad expired even the mig.~ty monuments of , Egypt might have disappeared from the sight and thoughts of mankind? Now, let us go back to a period of a. hundred thousand years before the pyramids of Memphis were built. Geologists have roughly estimated tha.t, by process of decay and erosion, it takes about ten thousand yea.rs to deposit a foot of socalled soile't'aking allowance for waste so far as soil is eoncerne'3t , ~might be assumed that it would take several feet off the tops of roeks or rocky mountains and rocky plateaus to make one foot of soil. In this hundred thousand years J then, the soil plains of the earth would be ten feet .... , hi@.'LJ.er and all the high plateaus and mountains, even of the solidest rook, would be thirty or forty feet lower than when the pyramids were built. Just imagine such a scouring off of the elevated pa.rts of the earth' s surface and such a piling up of debris on the lower parts of the ea.rth's surfa.ce. What records could possibly be left at the end of that time of anything that previously existed? No records at all, except perhaps a few fossils and a few t very few, mat- I rices in the sediment. Owing to the constant tidal wa.ves that are passing through the . . ~"t'~ earth, temblors innumerable, gradual shrinkage, gelni:ial deposits, and to innumerable other causes even all the evidence of the mig..1-J.tiest modern engineers in mines and surface monuments could, and probably would, disappear. As I said, nothing could possibly be left excepting a few ca.sts, a few ma.trices, in the sediment and mud in the marshes and along the streams. Now, presuming that this fonner civilization had such a fonn ! 3t7 \ Possible Origins--l0. and sucbJa. tendenoy as to make it extremely unlikely, if not impossible, that any highly eivilizad human beings would be caught in the mud bath _ let us suppose for instance that these people were strictly vegetarians and that they bad stripped the earth of most wild animals and even of injurious insects; let us suppose that they practiced incineration rather than burial and that there was actually no wild life, no wild country and no floods permitted, no chance in fact existing for huma.n beings to be caught in the wilderness and in the marshes and preserved. How did these people live and how were their mental and physical activitl.es engaged that they should leave no marks of any kind that would 1 ast a hundred thou sand years? They might have lived without houses--the open air is not poison. What control did they have over nature and nature's laws which pennitted them to ; employ themeel ves physically and mentally? We cut down our forests, di~ in the quarry for material for our homes, we run deep mines into the hills to get metal J we obtain hea.t by extravagant \ methods of consun:dng coal deposits. We know that there exists all around 1 allover and through the earth a mighty foree which we call electricity. Modem rnan has bridled the stream and turned its force to his account; he has cSllght in windmills the force of the moving atmosphere; he has caught the sun's hea.t and made it drive an engine. How do we know that our ancestors weee not possessed of the knowledge of a. greater natural power and were able to make use of it? If they possessed the secret of catching, bridling and using natural electric currents they would have had no need for any other material to furnish them power and heat for any of the processes of the highest civiliza.tion. Did they know more than we do concerning the process of segre. gating aluminum fropJ. the clays, if so they would have needed no |
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