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robbed of their rails, had become weedy ridges and ditches upon the face
of the world; the old roads, strange barbaric tracks of flint and soil,
hammered by hand or rolled by rough iron rollers, strewn with
miscellaneous filth, and cut by iron hoofs and wheels into ruts and
puddles often many inches deep, had been replaced by patent tracks made
of a substance called Eadhamite. This Eadhamite--it was named after its
patentee--ranks with the invention of printing and steam as one of the
epoch-making discoveries of the world's history.
When Eadham discovered the substance, he probably thought of it as a
mere cheap substitute for india rubber; it cost a few shillings a ton.
But you can never tell all an invention will do. It was the genius of a
man named Warming that pointed to the possibility of using it, not only
for the tires of wheels, but as a road substance, and who organised the
enormous network of public ways that speedily covered the world.
These public ways were made with longitudinal divisions. On the outer on
either side went foot cyclists and conveyances travelling at a less
speed than twenty-five miles an hour; in the middle, motors capable of
speed up to a hundred; and the inner, Warming (in the face of enormous
ridicule) reserved for vehicles travelling at speeds of a hundred miles
an hour and upward.
For ten years his inner ways were vacant. Before he died they were the
most crowded of all, and vast light frameworks with wheels of twenty and
thirty feet in diameter, hurled along them at paces that year after year
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