Page:On the economy of machinery and manufactures - Babbage - 1846.djvu/295

Rh To produce movements even of a complicated kind is not difficult. There exist a great multitude of known contrivances for all the more usual purposes, and if the exertion of moderate power is the end of the mechanism to be contrived, it is possible to construct the whole machine upon paper, and to judge of the proper strength to be given to each part as well as to the frame-work which supports it, and also of its ultimate effect, long before a single part of it has been executed. In fact, all the contrivance, and all the improvements, ought first to be represented in the drawings.

(320.) On the other hand, there are effects dependent upon physical or chemical properties for the determination of which no drawings will be of any use. These are the legitimate objects of direct trial. For example;if the ultimate result of an engine is to be that it shall impress letters on a copper-plate by means of steel punches forced into it, all the mechanism by which the punches and the copper are to be moved at stated intervals, and brought into contact, is within the province of drawing, and the machinery may be arranged entirely upon paper. But a doubt may reasonably spring up, whether the bur that will be raised round the letter, which has been already punched upon the copper, may not interfere with the proper action of the punch for the letter which is to be punched next adjacent to it. It may also be feared that the effect of punching the second letter, if it be sufficiently near to the first, may distort the form of that first figure. If neither of these evils should arise, still the bur produced by the punching might be expected to interfere with the