The financial loss resulting from destroying one another's homes in the civil war would have built 15,000,000 houses, each costing $2,000.
No better illustration of this characteristic can be found than in the development of the nickel pocket for the storage battery, an element the size of a short lead-pencil, on which upward of five years were spent in experiments, costing over a million dollars, day after day, always apparently with the same tubes but with small variations carefully tabulated in the note-books.