Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/50

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imagine that the destinies of mankind, for centuries to come, can be seriously affected, much less determined, by the men of this generation in the United States."

The nineteenth century has been the first distinctively machine-using period. Until heat-motors could be found, it was impracticable to employ machinery in any very great extent in the performance of the work of the world. Until entire freedom of the worker could be assured, enabling him to devise and to find means of constructing machinery, inventions could not find general use. Until the machines for machine-making could be had, the general use of machinery could not be secured, simply because the finer classes of machinery could not be accurately and satisfactorily made. Until the modern system of manufacturing and of working to gauge, and of interchangeable parts, could be adopted, the production of an industrial system for mechanical production was not practicable. Thus all kinds of mechanisms and every department of invention waited upon every other until, nearing the beginning of the nineteenth century, the long-delayed conjunction was attained, the beginning of the machine-using age introduced a new era, and the world took a sudden leap forward; thenceforward advancing with a continuous acceleration. Then came a machine-using world. Then one man became equal, in productive power, to two or five, or sometimes to ten, or even to a hundred, lacking the aid of the machine. For the first time in the history of mankind, a real, permanent, rapid and rapidly increasing progress began. One man then became able to do the work of four of his predecessors in making agricultural machinery, and he made it incomparably better; one man could do the work of fifty in making gun-stocks, after the Blanchard lathe for turning irregular forms had been adapted to the task of aiding him. One man does the work of six in boot and shoe making; in some departments of textile manufacture one man with his machinery does the work of a hundred of earlier generations. In fact, the earlier generations from prehistoric days have no record of any very important progress. Each man, with his modern newspaper-printing press, taking its paper from its miles of rolls, printing, cutting into sheets, pasting together, folding and piling ready for the carrier, does the work that five hundred men would have been employed to do a century earlier, and then it would have been a work very badly done, as gauged by our standards. Mr. Wright reckons that the machinery of the United States gives the power of doing work that, without it, would require the labor of a hundred millions of workers; thus multiplying the average work of the average individual worker by about six. In a very large proportion of the later developments, especially in the application of steam-power,