Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 52 — page 125: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION no automatic factory control. Worst of all, there would be no possibility of a greater electrified world of the future, with consequent increase in leisure. Nowadays in the more modern pieces of apparatus the battery is left out in the cold. It has been replaced by other means of generating and storing electricity. But that should not blind us to the essential role played by the battery in the past. Power stations are relatively new. All the groundwork of elec- trical phenomena—the basic truths upon which is based so much of the things around us—was worked out with batteries long before the first power station was ever thought of. Always we must remember that the development and utilisation of electric current is something that has grown within the last couple of hundred years, whereas the science of electricity was—in every sense of the words— quite static for a coup:> of thousand years. Naturally, the battery is not alone responsible for the great advances in electricity. It needed to be used in conjunction with steam engines and turbines and thermionic valves and trans- istors. The essential point to remember is that probably no one would have thought of trying to invent these things if the battery had not been lying ready for such conjoint action. Batteries are still made in millions. Today they play a minor role—in flashlights, secondary circuits in radios and suchlike. But whenever you buy a humble little cell, you hold in your hand a device which, truly, unlocked for mankind the secrets of a vast section of nature. When you casually switch on a flash- light you are doing something that, when it was first done, held scientists enthralled with the possibilities before them. We get blasé, don’t we? i24 -comnliclooolkks.com