These pages belong to The Book of Popular Science, a subscription encyclopedia issued in fifteen volumes by The Grolier Society of New York, and the material gathered here—chapters, plates, captions, and editorial apparatus—dates from the mid-1920s. The work surveys the physical universe, the earth, invention, industry, plant and animal life, the human body, and the practical sciences of the household, in the popular-science manner of its day: authoritative contributors, lavish illustration, and a tone pitched at the general reader rather than the specialist. What follows traces the set’s characteristic arguments and set-pieces rather than a single continuous narrative.
From the Stars to the Soil
The Publisher’s Prospectus and the Promise of Popular Science
The volume opens not with its own text but with the machinery of its making: a subscription notice announcing a fifteen-volume set issued by the Grolier Society of New York, holder of a Sesqui-Centennial Gold Medal for Educational Value. Subscribers are promised annual loose-leaf supplements of at least fifty pages each May for ten years, a binder, and a personal information service staffed by the Society’s editors. The prices are set out plainly—cloth at $69.50, half-leather at $89.50, three-quarters Morocco at $107.50, full Morocco at $160—with supplements billed separately according to binding, and a firm stipulation that the work is sold only by representatives direct to the public, never discounted to jobbers or dealers. The title page names the enterprise The Book of Popular Science, subtitled The Wonders of Modern Discovery, The Triumphs of Inventive Genius, The Story of all Created Things and the World They Live In, edited by scientists from MIT, Cornell, Harvard, and Leland Stanford, with a long roll of collaborators and an index by Florence D. Johnston, printed at the Colonial Press in Boston. A Howard Russell Butler frontispiece renders a total solar eclipse—the moon’s dark disc, the greenish-gray corona, Venus above, hydrogen prominences, and the first Baily Bead of third contact—setting the tone of spectacle that the topical listings then extend through departments on “The Universe” and “The Earth,” with chapters on the nebular theory, the sun as lord of life, Saturn, the Milky Way, earthquakes, geysers and volcanoes, and the 1923 Japanese catastrophe.
Parallax, Weight, and the Discovery of Neptune
The substantive excerpts begin with a diagram of stellar parallax: a star observed from Earth in January and again in June appears displaced against more distant stars, and the apparent ellipse’s major axis, tied to the diameter of Earth’s orbit, yields the star’s distance, while a farther star shows a smaller shift. From there the text turns to Newton’s law, distinguishing mass—a fixed quantity of matter, though modern research hints at slight increases in inertial effect at enormous velocities—from weight, which changes with the masses of both bodies and their separation. This reasoning, the passage notes, made possible the discovery of Neptune and of dark companions to stars. A caption observes that Earth bulges at the equator, its radius some 133 miles greater than to the poles, so equal masses weigh less there. Photographs of sunspots taken over ten days in 1905 at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, prove the Sun revolves. Lunar eclipses are explained: sunlight refracted through Earth’s atmosphere, acting as a lens, dimly lights the moon with a coppery glow that a cloudy atmosphere may hide altogether; lunar eclipses are less frequent than solar—at most two, perhaps three, a year—yet seem more frequent locally because Earth’s shadow exceeds the moon’s diameter while the moon’s shadow covers only a narrow track, and at least two solar eclipses occur yearly, possibly five, all predictable by Oppolzer’s tables. A diagram then reconstructs Neptune’s discovery: Uranus moved faster between 1800 and 1810 than between 1830 and 1840, suggesting an unknown planet’s pull, and calculation led to Neptune’s sighting in 1846, a thousand million miles beyond Uranus—so Kepler’s laws are not strictly accurate, owing to interplanetary attraction. The moon, the text argues, is now waterless but once had water; Mars shows dry former seabeds, with Lowell’s spectroscopic evidence of present water; small planets lose water during their sun-sustained stage, and Earth may be slowly losing hers. Timekeeping follows: mariners use chronometers and sextants with the Nautical Almanac, two minutes’ error equaling half a degree, thirty geographical miles; ancient water-clocks with floats, dials, and pulley-driven hour-hands gave way to the water-clock sent by the king of Persia to Charlemagne some eleven hundred years earlier, with twelve doors, falling balls, and miniature horsemen, and to King Alfred’s candle-clock. A chapter opening then defines elements: mercuric oxide is a compound, tallow burns into carbon dioxide and water, and water itself, though unchanged by freezing or boiling, is decomposed by red-hot iron or carbon, by galvanic current, or by potassium into oxygen and hydrogen—so water is no element.
Davy’s Electrolysis and the Hunt for New Elements
Chemists, the passage continues, call a substance an element only after it has resisted the most violent and ingenious efforts to pull it apart, and even then one should be guarded, since substances that seem simple have often proved compound. Caustic potash long passed as an element until Sir Humphry Davy shook it asunder by electrolysis, separating the unknown metal potassium; Davy went on to discover sodium, was first to isolate strontium from its compounds, and proved chlorine and magnesium to be elements. Since his day about eighty elements are known. Some were hard to find because tightly combined in compounds; others, like the inert gases neon, xenon, argon, krypton, and helium, escaped notice because they occur in tiny amounts and combine with nothing. About half the elements are familiar, about half hardly known at all—the text lists the household names, then asks how many have heard of columbium or niobium, erbium, gadolinium, indium, lanthanum, neodymium, praseodymium, rhodium, samarium, terbium, thulium, ytterbium, yttrium, zirconium, or europium. Some rare elements were detected by spectrum analysis: white sunlight is a mixture of colored waves separable by a prism, and all solids at white heat give similar composite light, but a vaporized substance rendered incandescent gives characteristic colored rays. The instrument is the spectroscope, the method spectrum analysis, and minute traces suffice—one 180-millionth part of a grain of sodium, one six-millionth of lithium, one millionth of strontium and calcium. In 1860 Professor Bunsen, examining the deposit left by evaporation of the Durkheim springs in Germany, noticed bright lines never seen before and found cesium and rubidium. In 1862 Sir William Crookes discovered an element giving a magnificent bright green line, christened thallium from thallus, Latin for green twig. Two years later two indigo-colored lines betrayed another element to two German professors, who isolated it and called it indium; in 1875 two violet lines led to gallium.
Granite: Quarrying, Sawing, and the Walking Machine
Granite has been among the most popular building stones. The red granite of Syene was fashioned by the ancient Egyptians into obelisks, sarcophagi, and colossal statues and used in their temples, pyramids, and palaces; Scotch granites are the coarse red from Peterhead and the gray from Aberdeen, used in the United States for monumental work; gray and red granite are quarried in Canada—in British Columbia near Victoria, in Quebec around the lakes at the heads of the St.
The Turbine and the Steam Engine
A balanced turbine runs with almost no vibration, holding a constant speed that spares the machine wear and practically ends the need for repairs; only the shaft bearings want oil, which keeps the steam clean for its return to the boiler. At its rated load a good turbine shows no real economy over a good reciprocating engine, but above or below that load it burns less steam, since its efficiency stays nearly flat across the range. The turbine alone costs less than a reciprocating engine, though condensers and pumps narrow the gap; upkeep and attendance cost far less. A caption catches the scale of the thing: a ring of the Mauretania’s turbine-drum whirling at 720 miles an hour, its blades seizing steam that rushes as fast as forty-eight miles a minute—fast enough to circle the globe in eighty-three hours.
Heat, Fuel, and the Efficiency of Engines
Heat is the great source of power, and burning fuel the readiest way to get it. Heat engines split into two families: those that burn their fuel outside the cylinder, like the steam engine and the hot-air engine, and those that burn it inside, the gas and oil engines. The best steam plant turns at most sixteen per cent of its heat into work, the average plant only six to ten; the best internal-combustion engine reaches thirty-five per cent, an ordinary gas engine fifteen to twenty. Gasoline must be volatilized in a carburetor before it will serve.
The Canadian Pacific and the Electric Locomotive
The Canadian Pacific, joining Montreal to Vancouver across 2,906 miles, is counted among the greatest railway enterprises ever carried through, beating lakes, streams, mountains, bogs, avalanches and snow, a shortage of labour and Indian warfare—every tie on the mountain section said to have cost a shot at a lurking foe. A caption gives the “Olympian” electric locomotive: 3,000 horse-power, 112 feet long, 282 tons.
Salt, Diamonds, and the Miner’s Lamp
Waste brine is run into clay ponds to draw off sulphate of soda and chloride of potassium, though artificial cold now extracts the chemicals at once. Captions show the washing-pans and pulsators of the diamond mines, and miners reading fire-damp by its blue flame in their safety lamps.
Archimedes and Edison
Archimedes, born at Syracuse in 287 B.C., son of a geometer and intimate of King Hiero and Gelo, devised pulleys, windlasses, the water-screw and the war engines that held off Marcellus; the Romans starved the city into surrender after three years. Thomas Alva Edison, born at Milan, Ohio, on 11 February 1847, was called “addled” by his teacher and educated by his mother. He became a newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railway between Port Huron and Detroit, printed the Weekly Herald aboard the train, and lost his hearing after phosphorus set the car alight. With two old Morse registers he built an automatic telegraph recorder, and on 18 July 1877 came the “Whoo-oo-oo” experiment; John Kreusi made the model, and “Mary had a little lamb” was reproduced. Charles Bourseul in 1854, Philipp Reis in 1861 and Alexander Graham Bell in 1874—with the harmonic telegraph and the accident of 2 June 1875 involving Thomas A. Watson—mark the road to the telephone.
The Dry Plate and the First Kodak
An inventor working with a gelatine dry plate in his spare time found a coat of gelatine and silver bromide with the needed photographic qualities, contemporary with commercial dry-plate production in England. The dry plate never displaced the wet plate for technical work—photo-engraving and photo-lithography still rely on it—but it let the amateur carry a dozen exposures in a compact set of holders and develop them later. Bulk and weight still kept photography from the amateur’s reach until Eastman and William H. Walker produced rolled film of coated paper; its grain showed in prints, but it made the first Kodak of 1888: a simple box holding enough paper film for a hundred circular pictures two and a half inches across, the wagon-load of wet-plate gear shrunk to a box under the arm. After a hundred exposures the camera went back to the makers and returned loaded with finished prints. Paper film remained unsatisfactory, and the search turned to a transparent, flexible base.
Maxwell, Hertz, and the Coherer
James Clerk Maxwell suggested in 1864 that light crossed ninety-three million miles of space by rapid vibrations in the ether, and predicted slower vibrations that would not affect the eye. Dr. Heinrich Hertz proved it in 1886, discharging a condenser across a short air-gap and detecting the spark in a distant loop of wire—showing that a spark at one place makes a spark in a wire at another, that the vibrations reflect like light yet pass through substances light will not. Oliver Lodge at Liverpool and Professor Righi at Bologna gave the discovery close attention. In 1889 Edouard Branly found that metal filings in a glass tube compacted under ether vibrations; with his coherer a bell could be rung at a distance. Hertz, Lodge and Righi sought understanding, not signalling, and Hertz’s work ended with his death in 1894.
Marconi and the Wireless
Guglielmo Marconi, drawn to Righi’s investigations, began in 1895 experimenting with distant sparks upon coherers, and found the vibrations reached farther when one side of the spark-gap and the coherer went to ground and the other side of each to a vertical wire. With one winding of an induction coil joined to two metal spheres he worked a telegraph sounder several hundred feet away, keeping the filings loose with an electrically driven tapper. Scientists everywhere took up wireless telegraphy—Lodge, Muirhead and Jackson in England, Popoff in Russia, Slaby in Germany, Branly in France, Tesla, Fessenden and De Forest in America—but Marconi made the greater progress, taking his first patent in England in 1896. Under British government patronage he stretched signalling from a few hundred feet to several miles, and in 1899 spanned the English Channel, thirty-two miles, with much the same equipment, distance won by stronger sparks and higher aerials. The Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company was organized in 1897; the Lodge-Muirhead rights were bought late and the name changed to Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Company. In 1900 he could send messages, and he sailed for St. Johns, Newfoundland, to raise a temporary kite aerial. On 12 December 1901 he heard three dots—the code for “S”—from the Poldhu station. He built another station at Cape Breton, and soon commercial messages crossed the Atlantic regularly; a station at Clifden, Ireland, took the growing traffic, and the Wellfleet station was eventually commissioned only to be superseded by more powerful ones at Marion and Chatham.
Microbes, Resistance, and the Meaning of Health
The book turns from machinery and invention to the body itself, and to the strange fact that a great scientific discovery tends to close one chapter only to open another. The tubercle bacillus is the example: once the parasite is identified, the real question becomes why it harms some people and not others. Two men breathe in the same bacilli; one dies, the other kills them off. Health, in this account, is not merely the ability to digest a meal but the ability to digest one’s microbes—to produce the ferments that destroy invaders. Metchnikoff’s white blood cells, the “phagocytes” or eating cells, patrol day and night, arresting and killing microbes, and their work can be watched under a microscope or on a cinematograph screen. The illustrations carry the argument: the islands of Langerhans magnified forty times, Dr. Banting’s collaborator C. H. Best, and a rogues’ gallery of “six appalling enemies of the human race”—plague, consumption, malaria and its mosquito, the rat-flea, the disease-laden fly, cholera, typhoid, and the yellow-fever mosquito.
The Living Soil
Soil, most people assume, is dead stuff that merely holds a plant upright. The book insists otherwise: a pound of ordinary soil holds hundreds of millions of bacteria, more life below ground than above it. A demonstration with a lump of sugar shows coffee climbing quickly through the compact mass but slowly through a loose layer on top—the principle of the soil mulch, with moist layers beneath holding available water. From there the survey runs through how soil is made—rock ground by water, heat, cold, ice and wind into residual, alluvial, marine, lacustrine, glacial and eolian soils—how it is named by particle size, its film and free water, the earthworm as “the first plowman,” mineral, carbon and nitrogen bacteria, fertilizers, and harvests, each year’s wheat feeding sixteen hundred million people.
Cuttings, Layers, and Grafts
Plants reproduce both sexually and vegetatively, and the book lingers on the second. A potato’s underground roots swell into tubers that spring up as new plants; a strawberry sends out runners that root at each node, the connecting tissue decaying until the new plant stands alone. Watching this, the primitive gardener conceived of imitating it—perhaps when a stick carelessly thrust into the ground took root—and so came cuttings, then layers, then budding and grafting. A piece of root, stem, or even leaf, properly placed, can make roots and a whole plant, a marvel that separates plant from higher animal life. Cuttings may be leaf, branch or root, and root best when the end nearest the earth in the parent goes into the soil; begonias rise from leaves laid on moist soil, currants and gooseberries from eight- to ten-inch cuttings taken when the leaves have fallen. Layering pins a young shoot underground until roots form, then the bent portion is cut free; easier than cuttings because the old plant keeps feeding it, layering supplies apple and pear stocks quickly for the grafting and budding that demand the greatest skill.
Preventing the Parasite
Nearly every garden plant suffers from parasitic organisms, sometimes harmlessly, sometimes with total loss of crop. Wet weather favors the parasite, so a field healthy one week may be half ruined the next. Few fungus diseases can be cured once infection takes hold; the work of fungicides is prevention, an armor put on before the enemy arrives—though external powdery mildews on roses, hops, lilacs and cherries can be killed by dusting with sulphur. Pruning, seed treatment, soil sterilization, crop rotation, drainage, destruction of alternate hosts and of disease-carrying insects, resistant varieties, and state inspection or quarantine round out the remedies. Spraying must be possible on short notice; no grower should trust to chance.
The Tarantula and the Bird-Eating Spiders
The spider is a larger cousin of the wolf-spider, whose nip is shrewd but milder than a scorpion’s sting. Its name is called shocking: the medieval epidemic of dancing in southern Europe, attributed to its bite, was named tarantism, and a revival in Italy drew distressing published accounts—yet the disease has no more to do with the tarantula than with the dodo, being a nervous affection of hysterical people, once treated by music and the dance called the tarantella. Experiment shows the bite painful but neither fatal nor followed by serious illness. The truly loathsome spiders are the bird-eaters of the tropics. Bates, in equatorial Brazil, verified the fact: a Mygale avicularia nearly two inches in body but seven inches across the legs, gray and reddish hairs coarse on body and legs, on a tree-trunk beside a dense white web in which two finches were entangled, one dead, one still under the monster’s body and smeared with its filthy saliva. He drove it off; the second bird soon died. Other tropical webs are stout enough to catch a young mouse, hauled four inches up and dead after ten hours, and small snakes and a three-inch fish. For wonders of web-making, the book says, seek no farther than the garden.
Rivals for the Mastery
The editorial matter gathers the volume’s apparatus: a contents list running from “Rivals for the Mastery” and “Strange Things Like Men” through the animal families to ants, bees and wasps; an introductory note that from bird to beast, insect to serpent, fish to reptile, all share the one trait of life, the subject of natural history; and a chapter on thrushes, five to six hundred species, only a dozen north of Mexico, noted for song—the nightingale, the hermit thrush, the solitaire—and for the robin, aberrant in color, christened by settlers for its resemblance to the European bird. “Rivals for the Mastery” asks what would have happened had man never been created, whether nature would have evolved another lord, and answers that man is a mammal, the most modern of animals, recapitulating life’s stages in the embryo, his thinking brain without parallel. Early life follows: a scorpion among the first land animals, then armored fish with plates of mail and gripping teeth under the law “Eat or be eaten,” then insects and spider-like creatures.
Agassiz and Ampère
The biographical dictionary begins. Louis Agassiz, born at Motier in Switzerland in 1807, son of a clergyman, educated at Lausanne, Zurich, Heidelberg, Erlangen and Munich, graduated in medicine and philosophy; his arrangement of Spix’s Brazilian fishes drew Cuvier, whose pupil he became, and at twenty-four he was professor at Neuchatel, completing in fourteen years the “Recherches sur les poissons fossiles.” Invited to lecture at the Lowell Institute in Boston in 1846, he was appointed professor at Harvard, founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology, remained poor from his liberality to it, and established on Penikese Island a practical school of marine zoology, precursor of all summer schools.
What the Set Is Really Arguing
Running beneath the disparate chapters is a settled confidence that science is a single connected enterprise, and that its findings, however startling, hang together. The treatment of the elements makes the point concretely: chemists call a substance an element only after it has resisted the most violent efforts to pull it apart, and even then the text counsels caution, since caustic potash passed for an element until Davy broke it down by electrolysis and drew potassium from it. The same humility recurs in the study of heredity, where a theory of evolution accepted for decades is said to be “crumpling into fragments before the contents of a pea-pod.” The set admires discovery but distrusts finality; each great finding, whether the tubercle bacillus or radium, closes a long chapter only to open a new one.
A second conviction is that the invisible governs the visible. Spectrum analysis detects one 180-millionth part of a grain of sodium; the white blood cells, which Metchnikoff named phagocytes, patrol the body day and night; soil teems with bacteria in the hundreds of millions per pound, so that the earth beneath a field is more crowded than the air above it. The book repeatedly asks the reader to revise his sense of scale, and it treats the microscope and the spectroscope as instruments of moral as well as scientific instruction — the battle in a drop of blood decides whether a patient lives.
The Human Being as the Central Problem
The set’s most sustained reflection concerns man, posed as the “paragon and paradox of animals.” Students divide between those who stress man’s resemblance to the lower animals and those who insist on his uniqueness; the text refuses the choice, arguing that the contradiction is only apparent and that science must reckon with both sets of facts. It distinguishes the physiological standpoint, in which a man is seventy kilograms of material, from the psychological, in which he is a creature of purposive knowledge and will, and warns that a physiology which denies mind is worse than a lie. Health, in this scheme, is not merely the capacity to digest food but a positive power of resistance — the ability to digest one’s microbes as one digests one’s meals. The household chapters extend the same reasoning into daily life, treating the family budget, the pasteurizing room, and the location of a house as proper objects of scientific attention.
A Period Piece with a Long Reach
Much of the set now reads as a document of its moment: the confidence in eugenics, the assumption that woman’s sphere is the home, the wonder at a photograph transmitted from Cleveland to New York in forty-four minutes. Yet the historical reach is genuine. The account of Marconi hearing three dots at St. John’s, the story of the Portland Vase smashed by a visitor in 1845, the Wright brothers’ fifty-nine seconds at Kitty Hawk, the Phoenician kettle melted into glass on the river Belus — these are told with an eye for the human detail that keeps an encyclopedia alive. The set’s enduring value lies less in any single conclusion than in its portrait of a culture persuaded that everything created, from the corona of an eclipsed sun to the earthworm it calls the first plowman, could be described, measured, and understood.
