The Great Stone of Sardis

To endeavor to carry some of the great inventions and mechanical improvements of the latter part of this century into the early decades of the next was the main incentive to the writing of this story. The wonderful power of projection possessed by the ordnance of to-day, the advance made in the art of submarine navigation, and the astonishing special results of the action of electric light have given to the thinking men of this age reason to expect a still greater progress in these branches, which have already progressed so far. To show some possible results from this progression has been the object of the labors of most of the men and women who play their parts in this book. These men and women are, for the most part, plain people who might have lived anywhere, but the scene of their actions, when not penetrating into the polar regions, was laid in northern New Jersey, for the reason that it pleased me to make my characters dare and love and succeed amid the same beautiful scenery which surrounded me as I wrote the story. No one of these characters is drawn from real life. In his youth Roland Crewe might have been acquainted with Mr. Edison, and the success of that eminent tamer of natural forces may have fired his young ambition to do great deeds in the same arena.