CHART II

THE INTERNAL WONDERS OF THE HUMAN BODY REVEALED

THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS MARVELOUS PERFECTION

Wonderful Structure of the Body — The human body is the highest form of animal life.  It is full of beautiful proportions and divinely symmetrical in shape, form, mould and outline.  We look with honest pride and glowing admiration upon the many accomplishments that man is achieved in the world around us.  We see is skill displayed in the various arts and sciences, and we look with awe upon the projects of his intellect and reason, the realization of which is but a small question of time!  We boast of our ships, our steamboats and our steam cars; we are justly proud of our bridges, our viaducts and the progress of our engineering skill; we grow enthusiastic over our telegraphs, our telephones, our electric lights; we feel a degree of national pride in the achievements in successes of Edison, the wizard of Menlo Park; aware, let us ask, in the whole range of events, the acquirements of arts, the attainments of engineering, or the successes and promises of electrical sciences, can we find such an other structure as the human body, that curious, yet perfect world of wonders!

As we closed up the section on chart 1, I marveled at the lack of verbosity (apparently it’s contagious upon reading this book) that the author had foregone.  The author must have sensed the fact that they missed an opportunity and rapidly work to make it up in the titles of this section and in this opening paragraph.  The flowery language is definitely back.

Even more interesting are several anecdotes about the moral goals and accomplishments of the human race that distinctly date the book.  The author describes steamboats and steam cars as existing technologies and not technologies are long dead.  The author then goes on to describe new technologies such as electric lights, telephones, and even telegraphs, which are technologies that today are either dead or dying.  The author even speaks of Thomas Edison in a way that makes you think that Thomas Edison is actually alive or just recently passed, possibly someone at the author even knew.  For the record Thomas Edison did not pass away until 1931, and so the author was in fact dropping a name of a living hero to technology into the advances of not only science but practical applications of science. 

Today we might mention people like Steve Wozniak or Steve Jobs were Bill Gates as people that are brought a modern marvel of technology in the personal computer into the homes and offices and/or rooms of almost every person in the United States.  In fact it’s probably more similar in that they did this from our perspective 27 to 30 years ago, this book was written in 1916, but earlier drafts had been written since the 1860s.  So in fact this book survived during the approximate timeframe that Thomas Edison survived, and at the time of this particular writing the lightbulb had been in existence for about 30 years.  I believe it was invented in 1878 in this book was written in 1916 so that’s actually about 38 years. 

Comparably this is 2007 as I’m writing this today and the personal computer was invented somewhere between 1972 and 1976 depending on which organization or person you credit for creating the personal computer.  My personal vote goes to Xerox and the Palo Alto research Center which created essentially a desktop computer which they showed off to people like Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.  Like Edison our modern-day trio largely improved upon inventions and innovations created by others.  There are a number of remarkable similarities in that regards.