Making Minutes Grow by F W Boreham
Another unpublished, handwritten essay by F W Boreham that has lost its first and last page.
It seems that in the first page F W Boreham has described the invention of a machine or mode of transport that is faster than the old model and that this invention has met with resistance in some quarters. He may have been writing about the setting of a new record (301 mph in 1935) by Malcolm Campbell and later his son, Donald Campbell, in cars and boats called ‘Bluebird’
across the world at a speed that has put to shame all earlier performances. There is no end to it.
Those who gaze superficially upon the breath-taking drama throw up their hands in apprehension and horror. They hear of brave men being ruthlessly sacrificed on the altar of swiftness. They see neither rhyme no reason in the passionate desire to shatter the proudest records of the years. They vainly sigh for a tranquil world in which everything will jog along in a good old-fashioned way.
In the very natural and very commendable sympathy with those who suffer in pioneering a faster way of life, these excellent people forget that the quest of speed has much to its credit. Speed represents man’s triumph over the tyranny of space. It connotes the saving of time; and, since a man’s life is made up of a certain quantity of time, it follows that the saving of time is neither more nor less than the saving of life itself.
Every man is compelled to spend a certain amount of his time, and therefore a certain proportion of his life, in travelling to the theatre of his production, the more swiftly he can travel, the more he can produce; or, alternatively, the more leisure he can enjoy from both travel and production. Jack London’s famous hero accelerated the ferry. Instead of crossing the bay in forty minutes, it made the journey in twenty. With the faster ferry, the districts across the water achieved sudden popularity. Five people lived where only one had lived before; the life of the waterside suburbs and the life of each individual inhabiting those suburbs, became magically and radically transformed.
Or, looking in another direction, it is pertinent to ask how many thousands of lives have been saved at sea and among the vast solitude of the desert and the bush through quick wireless communication and engines capable of very high speed? How many lives have been saved in more settled and populous areas through the arrival of the doctor in a fast car? The bush missions of the far interior of this great continent are equipped with planes so that urgent cases, away in the Never-Never country,[1] can be quickly reached and relieved.
In his ‘History of the Nineteenth Century,’ Mr Robert MacKenzie shows that every invention making for more rapid travel has made a distinct contribution to the cementing of international relationships. Men of different countries and of different ideologies are enabled to meet; to learn how little there is on either side to hate, how much to love; to establish ties of commercial relationship and to correct errors of opinion by friendly conflict of mind. Ancient prejudice melts away under the fuller knowledge gained. Peculiarities of speech,
[1] The "Never-Never Country" refers to a vast, remote, and sparsely populated area in the Australian Outback, particularly in the Northern Territory and Queensland. It can also be used metaphorically to describe an imaginary or unreal place. The term has been used by Australian writers like Henry Lawson and Jeannie Gunn to describe the harsh landscapes and isolated way of life in the outback.