This month, Create invites us to consider ways in which science fiction has become science fact in our daily lives. This isn't really a new idea: human technology progresses. One generation's far-fetched idea becomes another's matter-of-fact reality. Take the skyscraper. Once an architect's pipe dream, but now an annoyance to air traffic and a supernormal stimulus to the pigeon population.

Back a hundred years ago or so, engineers and architects were pretty proud of this newfangled development. What follows is an excerpt from an 1895 book about the marvels of modern science. We've made it into a 'cloze test'. See if you can fill in the blanks.

It is possible to put up one of these colossal twenty-story buildings within a twelvemonth. When we consider that many of the great cathedrals of Europe required several ________ for their erection, the dome of ___________ at Rome being of itself a work of one hundred years, we the better appreciate the wonders of modern building. And what an ____ of men are employed, and how systematically they work! The lower stories are finished while the upper ones are in course of erection, and often there are tenants inside doing ________ while the work goes on.

The enormous amount of ________ in one of these great buildings may be inferred from the statement that there are ten and a half miles of water-, gas-, waste-, and vent-pipes in the Manhattan Life Insurance Company's building, comer Broadway and New Streets, New York. Here are also laid thirty-five _____ of electric wires. Among other curiosities of construction in such buildings are the great number of steam-pumps. In one case the _________ called for twenty-three of these, though the building was designed for ordinary uses. Another _______ is an ice-water plant, which has been introduced with success, being supplied from a refrigerating _________ in the sub-cellar. The object of this is to avoid the ________ of having ice carried all through the building by tenants. Fountains are therefore supplied in each of the halls, connected with a special shaft run through the building to carry the cold-water pipes, and keep them separated from steam-pipes and radiators.

Words: nuisance, St. Peter's, centuries, business, army, miles, contract, plumbing, novelty, apparatus

Now, aren't you just amazed? Check your answers by clicking on the picture below, and see if you're ready to join the Modern Age.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

01.06.15 Front Page

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