Selection from an article titled “Electricity As a Factor In Happiness”

…And these things gained, what will be the addition to human happiness? It is always necessary to ask that question; for, as a rule, the grand prizes of human intelligence, the additions to human knowledge of which we are so proud, have added little to the happiness, of the millions who, and not the few rich, constitute man. It would be difficult, indeed, to prove that any great scientific discovery, except the lucifer-match, which made light and heat, as it were, portable, chloroform, which extinguished some forms of pain, and vaccination, has ever done very much to reduce the mighty sum of human misery…