A. Russell Bond

“ The twentieth century finds this planet again stocked with monsters larger and more powerful than the gigantic saurians that dominated the earth in the Jurassic and Cretaceous epochs, but our mighty fire-breathing, steel-sinewed beasts are humbly subservient to the will of man.
The spectacle of a large steam shovel at work makes one feel at once very small and very big. Before the work of this monster the human shoveler shrinks to the proportions of a mere insect. ”

“ But the spinning wheel and hand loom could not stand long in the path of power-driven machinery, and now huge, blind machines, with stiff, unbending fingers of metal, comb out the matted masses of raw material, remove the dirt and twigs, straighten out the snarls far quicker and better than could be done by hand, and transform the fibers into beautiful fabrics such as in former days would have been the envy of kings. ”

“ It was about fifty thousand years ago, according to conservative estimates, that primitive man first began to use tools, and he managed to exist and thrive and develop to a very high degree of civilization during practically the whole of that period without touching the stores of energy that lay beneath his feet. It was only yesterday that the steam engine was invented, and when it was discovered how to turn heat into work and what a wealth of power was stored up in the deposits of coal there started a lavish and profligate squandering of the precious heritage of the Carboniferous era. ”

“ So terrible has modern war become that with each great conflict it has seemed as if its very dreadfulness would stay the hand of the invader and make him hesitate to expose his men to the horrible monsters which science and invention have created. ”

“ Surely the world owes a tremendous debt to Hussey and particularly to McCormick for introducing machinery into agriculture and starting the train of inventions which in the space of two-thirds of a century have led up to the present remarkable era of machine farming.
There still remains one task of the farmer that has not yet been accomplished with unqualified success by machine. The harvesting of the corn crop is a tedious and disagreeable task and one which the farmer would only too gladly turn over to the machine. ”

“ That is why a dam which is strong enough to hold back the waters of a pond will be just as able to hold back the waters of the whole ocean if it be placed in a sheltered bay where ocean waves cannot tear it to pieces. The ocean, despite its enormous mass, can exert no more pressure per foot of depth than the water in a cistern. ”

“ It is because in nature we must contend with all sorts of surface conditions, soft and hard and seldom smooth, that the rolling principle of locomotion is not to be found in any species of animal. The legs of an animal are levers, just as a wheel is a system of levers, but in the former case the levers can be folded or extended to adapt themselves to all the unevennesses of the ground. No animal can begin to run as fast as an automobile on a good road, but on the other hand we have yet to build a machine which will run as fast as a horse on soft and uneven ground. ”

“ It is the sun’s energy that is stored in coal beds and oil fields; it is the sun’s energy that raises water from the ocean to the tops of our mountains; it is the sun’s energy that makes the winds blow, and through them disturbs the surface of the ocean, and even the tides owe a part of their energy to the attraction of the sun. Why can we not utilize the energy of the sun directly, instead of at second hand? In the sunshine that beats upon the earth there is seventy-thousand times as much energy as we now obtain from coal. ”

“ It is comparatively easy to comprehend the development of machines for dealing with such gross material as earth, rock, iron, and wood, but when we come to consider the infinitely delicate and almost imponderable fibers that go to make up our textiles, the marvel is that any but highly skilled human hands, guided by keen eyesight, could combine the tangled and obstreperous filaments into fine yarn and weave this yarn into complicated patterns of cloth. ”

“ In fact, even though an ounce of gold is worth twice as much as a ton of iron, the value of the iron we dig out of the earth each year is far greater than that of gold. When that rough ore is converted into iron and steel and then into thousands of useful articles, its value mounts so high that it cannot be estimated. The qualities of iron and its alloys are so excellent and so varied under different treatment that this metal may truly be said to form the foundation of all our mechanical progress. ”

“ BURNING AIR IN THE AUTOMOBILE ENGINE
Owing to the widespread use of automobiles, the general public is better acquainted with internal-combustion engines than with steam engines. Nevertheless, there are many elementary facts in connection with gasoline engines that are not generally known. The average motorist probably does not realize that he burns far more air in his motor than gasoline, and he probably does not understand why it is that the mixture of gasoline vapor and air must be compressed before it is ignited, or why only one out of four strokes of the piston is a power stroke. ”

“ We do not ordinarily think of air as having any weight. We know that the ocean of air bears on the earth with a pressure of about 141⁄2 pounds per square inch, or about a ton per square foot at sea level. This amounts to 28 millions tons per square mile and, when we multiply this figure by the number of square miles of surface in the total area of the earth, we find that the whole ocean of air has a weight of 5,500,000,000,000,000 tons—a figure which is far beyond our conception, but it does impress us with the fact that air is a ponderable substance. ”

“ Even when the science of mechanics came to be studied, it was shrouded in a veil of mystery, and it was beneath the dignity of the man of science to impart his knowledge to the artisan. There was a lack of cooperation between science and industry that has persisted to a certain extent even up to the present time. ”

“ To-day, after a titanic struggle which cost millions of human lives, which destroyed billions of dollars’ worth of property, and which made itself felt to the remotest corners of the earth, serious efforts are being made to banish war, but at the same time inventors here and abroad are busy inventing new and more powerful engines of death, and the prospects are that the next big war, should there ever be one, will be even more horrible and destructive than the one we have just passed through. ”

“ While it is true that the human body is a machine and every movement of which it is capable may be reproduced by mechanical means, the difficulty is to copy many operations without involving such complexity of members as to make the mechanism wholly impracticable. The human hand is really a very intricate piece of mechanism which by long generations of evolution and development has become wonderfully deft. It exhibits this deftness and complexity of movement in tying knots and the very intricacy of this operation was enough to baffle the majority of inventors. ”

“ To-day popular usage is restoring to the term its original broad interpretation, and it is in this popular but rather unorthodox sense that “Mechanics” has been chosen as the title of this book; for although certain elementary principles of mechanics are described and explained, the major portion of the book deals with machines and their evolution to their present stage of perfection.
Machines are man’s creation, and yet in a sense the man of to-day is a machine product; for modern civilization owes its material and in large measure its esthetic development to machinery. ”

“ There are forces in existence when there is no motion. When you hold a weight in your hand there is a force tending to pull the weight to the earth, but this force is opposed by an equal force exerted by your muscles in holding up the weight. There is no motion because the two forces are perfectly balanced. If they were unbalanced, there would be motion in the direction of the greater force. If the pull of the arm is greater than that of gravity, the weight will be lifted, and if the weight is too heavy for the arm to support, it will go down despite muscular efforts to prevent it. ”

“ After all, we shall not be plunged into dire want when our stores of coal are exhausted. There will be other sources of power to draw upon, most of which will be inexhaustible. Furthermore, we have recently discovered in atoms of matter stores of energy incomparably greater than any that have heretofore been used to work the will of man. How to utilize this energy we have not yet learned, but the energy is there, and no doubt, some day, probably long before coal takes its place in museum collections, we shall be possessed of a new slave, far more powerful than that which has served us so far. ”

“ The object of stabilizing a ship is not merely to cater to the comfort of passengers who are subject to seasickness, but to save wear and tear on the vessel and also to economize time and fuel. An unstabilized ship riding a heavy sea pursues a very sinuous course; in other words, it must travel farther than it would in smooth water. The rudder must constantly be turned to keep the ship on its course, and this acts as a drag on the progress of the ship, slowing it down and wasting the power of the engine. ”

“ FROM the day when man began to assert his superiority over other animals he began to cast longing eyes at the sky. Fired with ambition and stirred with a spirit of mastery he chafed at the bonds that bound him to earth ”

“ You may lift it, or lower it, or move it sideways in any direction, and it will not show the least sign of rebellion so long as the plane of its rotation is not deflected, but attempt to twist its plane of rotation and it will resist with the power of a giant. The resistance that even a small gyroscope will develop is astounding. A wheel weighing not more than 10 pounds may develop so much energy that a man twenty times as heavy pushing with all his might cannot turn it over. Not only does it resist the push, but it actually leans back against the pusher. ”

“ The story of machinery, from primitive man’s first attempts to augment his physical powers with mechanical aids down to the present era of gigantic, steel-muscled machinery and marvelously intricate mechanisms, is the story of human progress. ”

“ In Egypt the wheel had a wonderful effect on agriculture. In that dry land water is, and always has been, most precious. No wonder the Nile was venerated! It meant life—life to crops, and hence life to man. How to raise water from this stream of life in time of drought was the great problem of the Egyptian. As slave labor was cheap, it was customary to haul up the precious water, a bucket at a time, and pour it over the fields. ”

“ A bullet is forced out of a gun by the sudden expansion of gases behind it, but after it leaves the muzzle and the influence of the gases, why does it keep on traveling? We may just as well reverse the question and ask why it should ever stop. Having once acquired a certain velocity it keeps that velocity because of its inertia or mechanical helplessness, and it would keep on going forever were it not for the resistance offered by the air and the pull of gravity, which gradually draws it down to earth. [337] It takes a deal of energy to divert the bullet from its course. ”

“ WHILE we may glory in the wonderful mechanical progress of to-day, we must not overlook the marvelous skill of the ancient artisan nor forget that it is to his inventive genius that we are indebted for practically every hand tool we possess. ”

“ The fossilized vegetation of by-gone ages is now employed to drive our locomotives and steamships, to turn our factory wheels, to extract metals from the ore and help us shape them according to our needs and desires, to convert iron into steel and to heat and light our houses. We all know that there is a limited supply of coal in the world and that some day the stores will be exhausted, yet we go on using larger quantities of the fuel each year. ”

“ The ancients used flowing streams not so much for power purposes as to lift water to a higher level so that it would flow into their irrigating ditches. Nowadays, electricity, steam, or air is used for elevating water, but we have a very ingenious machine which makes the stream lift a part of itself. This machine is very different in principle from the old Egyptian noria. It depends upon the kinetic energy of water in motion. You cannot push a nail into a piece of wood with a hammer but you can easily drive it in by striking it with the hammer. ”

“ In the air lock the pressure must be built up slowly so that it will permeate a man’s whole system. When we realize that the pressure that men have to support in caisson work may amount to from fifty to one hundred tons on the whole body, it is difficult at first to understand why the body is not flattened out like a pancake. It is only by permitting the system to absorb the pressure so that there is as much internal pressure as that outside that a man is able to enter a compressed air chamber without harmful results. ”

“ EVERY animal is a complex machine, provided with its own motive power and a brain for directing the operation of its own mechanical elements. Not satisfied with the mechanism that nature has put into the human machine, man has reached for other elements and devised mechanisms of his own in order to supplement the human machine and increase its efficiency. ”