Abstract
PROBLEMS of transportation have been solved -L more or less successfully in all ages, and some of them, such as the moving of stones to Stonehenge, etc., still excite our wonder and admiration. Such works, and similar ones of much greater magnitude in the East, could be accomplished by quite crude methods if there was unlimited labour available, and if time were of no consequence. The transportation which aids civilisation is that which cuts down the wastage of power to a minimum and reduces the time occupied in carrying this out. It is here that science has helped in times past, and will help increasingly in the future if we are to go forward. In no other branch is Telford's dictum that the science of engineering is “the art of directing the great sources of power in Nature for the use and convenience of man” so well exemplified, and this utilisation has been carried forward at ever-increasing speed during the last hundred years. If we take the definition of science as “ordered knowledge of natural phenomena and of the relations between them,” as given by W. C. D. Whetham in the “Encyclopaedia Britannica,” we shall easily see how transportation has been dependent upon it.
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FOWLER, H. Transport and its Indebtedness to Science. Nature 112, 474–477 (1923). https://doi.org/10.1038/112474a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/112474a0