Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/487

Rh there is constant progress in the direction of an increased product, of a finer quality, from the same machinery. The standard of productive capacity is thus shown to be variable, dependent in a perceptible degree upon the ability of the management to get the best results from a given capacity. The obvious advance in the future is in this direction. We can hardly look for any radical new departure in the mechanism of wool manufacture, such as occurred with the introduction of automatic spinning, the combing machine, and the power-loom. At the same time it would be foolish to assert that some new mechanical discovery, which may be at this very moment lying fallow in the brain of an unknown genius, will not work another revolution as complete as that which marks the transition from the household to the factory system. We can not, for instance, doubt that electricity is to work its wonders in this department of human industry as well as in every other.

This paper may properly conclude with some indication of the nature of the world's gain from the evolution of the wool manufacture. It is difficult to obtain a proper standard for such comparison. Statistics, even were they obtainable, present the contrast very inadequately. The total gain secured over hand labor can hardly be estimated at an absolute value, for the present efficiency can not be obtained. In the principal operations of the manufacture the increase has been about as follows: In olden times a woman could card one pound of wool a day by hand. At present one operative, with the necessary machinery, can card one hundred to one hundred and fifty pounds a day. Hence the improvement is about one hundred and twenty-five. On a spinning-wheel a woman could produce daily two skeins. An average mule today spins about five hundred pounds; hence the improvement is about five hundred times. On a hand-loom it took a day to weave two to three yards. Power-looms produce from thirty-five to fifty yards a day, or an improvement of seventeen. Hence, disregarding all other factors but these, and placing a modest estimate, it is possible at present, with power machinery, to produce over seven hundred times more goods to-day than in the olden time, with the same number of hands, disregarding the quality, design, etc. This enormous gain can hardly be stated by periods. It has practically been achieved in a single century. In 1800 it was declared in the British Parliament that thirty-five persons could then accomplish, in the wool manufacture, with the aid of machinery, what would have required the labor of sixteen hundred and forty persons in 1785. That was equivalent to the statement that one person could then do the same work that forty-seven had done fifteen years earlier.

We have already alluded to the last half of the eighteenth