ABSTRACT
Writing in the year 1904, Henry Adams—''an elderly and timid single gentleman in Paris'', as he described himself—recorded his astonishment at the year-byyear expansion of steam power and electric power, and at the discovery of radioactivity; and he propounded a ''law of acceleration''. The amount of force at the disposal of mankind was increasing faster and faster, he noted. At the rate of progress since 1800, continued Adams, ''every American who lived into the year 2000 would know how to control unlimited power''. Since 1900 the proportion of Americans engaged in farming has taken a big drop; the proportion engaged in industry, overall, has changed very little; the proportion engaged in the ''services'' has jumped upward. Perhaps Henry Adams was not so far wrong with his prediction that ''every American who lived into the year 2000 would know how to control unlimited power''.
