Steampunk Prime_ A Vintage Steampunk Reader - Mike Ashley [67]
Everybody, in short, had civilization brought to his front door, wherever he lived, or within easy reach of his home by walking balloon or electric bicycle.
Gas was used almost exclusively for heat and electricity for lighting. Electric lighting had been brought to a point of perfection that made its radiance soft, diffused, and clear, without undue sharpness; and the eyesight of human beings had greatly improved in consequence, near sight and blindness having been much diminished.
Starch, sugar, and protean substances were made in immense quantities by factories on the Amazon, in Indiana, and in Africa, from wood fiber, by chemical transformations — the construction of the molecules of carbohydrates and methods of rearranging this construction having been discovered, so that no energy was absorbed or given out in the transformation. Thus, food of a simple kind was amazingly abundant and cheap. Artificial wood, also, was made from compressed chloro-cellulose and talc, with a solvent, and disintegrated by water under pressure.
Artificial leather was produced by the electrical fixature of nitrogen in carbohydrates. Shoes were molded directly from this material, one machine making three hundred pairs of shoes in an hour. They were afterwards passed through another process to make them flexible, and the porosity of the leather was varied to suit different climates, shoes for damp climates having large pores and those for dry regions having pores that were infinitesimal.
Food and clothing provision, therefore, and wood for building were as abundant as could be. Forest preservation was also carefully attended to, with the best effects on climate and water-supply. Bricks were made six times as large as the old style; and dried in roomy iron chambers with fifty per cent of sand to prevent shrinkage. They were then hoisted into place in large quantities by a machine and laid — several courses at a time — with a cement mixed of lime, clay, and nitre, which produced intense heat and fused the masonry into a solid, permanent mass, so that ordinary house-building was very easy.
Then in respect of health and bodily comfort, a method had been perfected of causing new teeth to grow by means of calcareous, antisepticised bandages.
The wise men of the race had determined that the white corpuscles of the blood are the policemen of organized beings against microbes. By the education of these corpuscles, and inuring then to microbes of every kind, they were made capable of resisting the attacks of the enemy; and even chemical poisons were rendered harmless by the training of the white corpuscles. A compound virus had likewise been discovered and brought into use, consisting of the weakened cultures of rabies, consumption, diphtheria, cholera, splenic fever, erysipelas, typhoid, yellow, scarlet, and malarial fever, and several other diseases of microbic origin. Children received an inoculation with this virus once in seven years, by compulsory law; and the diseases against which it was directed had become rare.
In addition to all this, it had become possible to manufacture pure diamonds by subjecting prepared metal crystals to the action of time, heat, and pressure; while immersed in bisulphide of carbon, in bulbs of pure quartz. By a magnetically deflected arc, the surface was plumbagoed, and pure iron was electroplated over the ball until it increased to twenty times its original diameter. Then the whole was submitted to a gradually