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It is like carrying a load up a mountain; whether one carries it straight up a steep path or more gradually by a road of gentle slope, precisely the same number of foot-pounds must be exerted. Therefore to do the same work in a small fraction of the time means determined effort.
How often have troops spent with exhaustion responded to the call of such simple phrases as "The Flag," "Our Country," "Liberty," or such songs as "The Marseillaise," "God Save the King," "Dixie"! These phrases are but the signs of ideas, yet the sounding of these phrases has summoned these ideas into consciousness, and the summoning of these ideas into consciousness has placed undreamed-of and immeasurable foot-pounds of energy on the hair-trigger of action.
How many foot-pounds did the boy heart of Chatterton beat before it broke? Something may be left to the imagination! We backtrailed to a point where the cliff fell away into a rock-strewn incline, and clambered down a break-neck slope to the edge of the crystal broil. There was a strange exhilaration about it a novel sense of discovering a natural wonder for ourselves.
Whether we shall ever be able to express consciousness in foot-pounds, or not, is more than I will venture to say; but that there is evidence of the existence of some correlation between mechanical motion and consciousness, is as plain as anything can be. Suppose the poles of an electric battery to be connected by a platinum wire.
It is the foot-pounds per minute that fixes the size of the motor.
A man, however, who stands still under a load is exerting no horse-power whatever, and this accounts for the fact that no constant relation could be traced in various kinds of heavy laboring work between the foot-pounds of energy exerted and the tiring effect of the work on the man.
One pound of coal in this way gives out 14,000 heat units, which is the equivalent of 11,000,000 foot-pounds of work, and if it could be all utilized would furnish a horse-power for five and a half hours. Can any inert body weighing a pound furnish a horse-power for half a day? And can a body give out what it has not got? Are gunpowder and nitro-glycerine inert?
"No, you'd rather go on lifting 250 pounds through two feet, an average of 500 foot-pounds, practically 62 kilowatts of wasted power. Do you know that by merely hitching a pulley to the back of your neck you could generate enough power to light your whole office?" We hung our heads. Simple as the thing was, we had never thought of it. "Very good," said the Stranger.
It is poor gymnastics when the main object is to expend a certain number of foot-pounds of energy to secure increase in cardiac and pulmonary activity, without care being taken that these organs are in a favorable condition to meet the increased demand put upon them.
Every muscle, every sense, every part of you is exercised at once, or in rapid succession, and no part has time to become seriously fatigued; so that you can play hard all the afternoon and never once be uncomfortably tired, though your muscles have done a tremendous lot of work, measured in foot-pounds or "boy-power," in that time. The good school imitates nature in this respect.
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