Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/154

144 Steam is apparently coming, as the various other motor-fluids are, into use on the highway, and, after an interregnum of a half-century or more, due to the stupidity of legislators mainly, the automobile, in innumerable forms and on innumerable 'systems,' is once again displacing the horse in city streets and, in less degree, perhaps, on country roads, and is promising ere long to do a large part of our transportation of merchandise over short routes and off the line of the railway. Thousands are now in use in this country and abroad, and tens—hundreds, nominally—of millions of dollars are invested in their manufacture.

In infinite variety the progress of invention thus reveals itself. Individuals, nations, even continents and worlds have courses like that of the rocket: rising with rapid acceleration, upward and onward, to a culmination, when a sudden development of energy from latent form occurs, and a brilliant illumination for the moment surprises and enlightens us; then the limit is attained, the path curves over and downward, and after a brief period, downward acceleration begins and its career presently comes to an end. This is not the history of invention, which is never self-limited; a step made is never retraced. The progress of the day is not only recorded in written and printed history and permanently preserved, but is given a still more permanent record in the life and habits and traditions of the people, and each invention and each new advance is the basis of a later and still higher progress. The only limit to be expected to this advancement of civilization, through invention and the mechanic arts, is that set by some catastrophe which shall ultimately involve the life of the race, having its source in natural evolutions of a physical character, and bringing to an end all the activities of mankind in some probably far-distant generation.

The extent to which the specialization consequent upon the changes in the mechanism and methods of manufactures have progressed during the century just past, may be realized more fully when it is understood that, for example, in the making of a watch, there may be fifteen or sixteen hundred operations conducted with the help of five or six hundred machines by as many operatives, each of whom necessarily acquires wonderful expertness in tasks thus repeated constantly, hour by hour, day by day, throughout the working day and the calendar year. These movements become intuitive and automatic; their accuracy and rapidity become almost incredible, and the human machine, through its internal automatism, thus relieves the mind and gives it freedom from stress and fatigue in a manner unknown to the worker of earlier days. The labor-assisting machinery also thus enables the operative to produce, without serious toil and fatigue, from ten to a hundred times as much of his special product as could his unaided predecessor in the vocation with, however, more concentrated attention giving far less skill and accuracy. The inventor and the mechanic thus illustrate the immense