Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/51

Rh the task of the machine could not be performed at all; as, for example, the haulage of the railway train at the rate of a mile a minute or more, or the driving of a transoceanic liner across three thousand miles of stormy seas at the speed of fifteen to twenty-five miles an hour. A large fleet would be required to carry the labor and provisions for a single craft, equivalent in total power, driven by animal force.

It has been the use of machinery that has permitted the people of our country to use twenty pounds of cotton per capita where they formerly used but five; to increase their consumption of iron and steel from a few pounds to four hundred per capita, and the consumption of steel from an insignificant amount up to two hundred and fifty pounds and over. This use of machinery and universal extension of mechanical engineering has even permitted the doubling of our population in the last generation and the increase in the number of people employed in productive vocations one hundred and seventy-five per cent., according to Mr. Wright's statistics. One-sixteenth of the whole population of the country is supported by labor in railway transportation, and the once minute proportion engaged in coach and other transportation by means of horses has been multiplied many times over; yet these people were the most vigorous and powerful of all opponents of this advance.

The sewing machine, giving the power of multiplying many times the productivity of the needle, instead of displacing the sewing girl, as once anticipated by many ignorant persons, proves to be not properly a labor-saving machine, but a machine assisting labor and multiplying not only the efficiency of the worker, but also many times increasing the quantity of work to be done and the numbers needed for the work, as occurs in all such cases. In a thousand instances the invention of a machine or the introduction of a new method in some department of mechanical engineering has brought into use an entirely new form of industry and made effective and productive the highest powers of thousands of people who otherwise would probably be compelled to drudge on in old ways and to content themselves with old rates of compensation. The reduction of costs of product and the increase in the wages of labor are the two most striking results of the revolution of the century; while the accession of value conferred upon material is sometimes quite as impressive, if not actually as important—as when the often recounted fact is noted of the increase of the value of iron from one dollar in the ore to five or six in the shape of iron bar, to $10 in any one of many finished machine-made forms, to $200 and upward in fine cutlery, to $5,000 and $10,000 in needles, to $200,000 and more in common watch-springs, and to perhaps half a million dollars in the shape of hair-springs, the most refined condition of the metal yet attained, or even up to $2,500,000, according to Mr. Woods, in the form of pallet-arbors.