Archibald Williams

“ The ploughman, plodding sturdily down the furrow behind his clever team, is indeed still a common sight; but in the tilling season do we not hear the snort of the steam-engine, as its steel rope tears a [320] six-furrow plough through the mellow earth? When the harvest comes we realise even more clearly how largely machinery has supplanted man; while in the processes of separating the grain from its straw the human element plays an even smaller part. ”

“ A few months hence furnaces will rage in its stomach, and cause it to force tons of steam into the mighty cylinders driving some majestic vessel across the Atlantic.
We pass giant lathes busy on the propeller shafts, huge boring mills which slowly smooth the interior of a cylinder, planers which face the valve slides; and we arrive, eye-weary, at the launching-ways where an ocean liner is being given her finishing touches. Then we begin [89] to moralise. That 600-foot floating palace is a concretion of parts, shaped, punched, cut, planed, bored, fixed by electricity. Where does man come in? ”

“ The steam-engine itself, which supplies us with such unbounded power, owes its present perfection to this most admirable means of giving to metallic objects the most precise and perfect geometrical forms. How could we, for instance, have good steam-engines if we had not the means of boring out a true cylinder, or turning a true piston-rod, or planing a valve face? ”

“ What we owe to Joseph Bramah and Henry Maudslay for their joint invention—the honour must be divided, like that of designing the steam hammer between Nasmyth and Wilson—it would indeed be hard to estimate. Wherever steady but enormous effort is required for lifting huge girders, houses, ships; for forcing wheels off their axles; for elevators; for advancing the boring shield of a tunnel; for compressing hay, wool, cotton, wood, even metal; for riveting, bending, drilling steel plates—there you will find some modification of the hydraulic press useful, if not indispensable. ”

“ The machine, striking a blow far more rapidly than can be done by hand, reduces the number of operators to one man, and perhaps his helper. So durable is the metal of these wonderful little mechanisms that the delivery of 360,000 blows daily for months, even though each is given with a force of perhaps half a ton, fails to wear them out; or at the most only necessitates the renewal of some minor and cheap part. The debt that civilisation owes to the substitution of mechanical for hand labour will be fully understood by anyone who is conversant with the history of tunnel-driving and mining. ”

“ We might linger in the departments where accumulators, sparking plugs, and other parts of the electrical apparatus of a car are made, or in the laboratory where chemists pry into the results of a new alloy, aided by powerful microscopes and marvellously delicate scales. But we will stop only to note the powerful machine which is stretching and crushing metal to ascertain its toughness. No care in experimenting is spared. The chemist, poring over his test tubes, plays as important a part in the construction of a car as the foundry man or the turner. ”

“ A rod of steel is put into the machine, and the turret, with half a dozen different tools, presents first one and then the other to the end of the rod bathed in thick oil, so that it is rapidly turned, bored, and shaped into caps, nuts, bolts, and the scores of other little accessories required in fitting up a motor-car. On seeing how all this work is done mechanically and methodically, with scarcely any other expense but the capital required in the upkeep of the machines and in driving them, one wonders how the automobile industry could be carried on without this labour-saving mechanism. ”

“ The tool, so hard that a journey through many miles of steel has no appreciable effect on its edge, shears its way remorselessly over the surface which presently may be tempered to a toughness resembling its own. If you want to resharpen the tool, it will be no good to attack it with any known metal. But somewhere in the works there is a machine whose buzzing emery-wheels are more than a match for it, and rapidly grind the blunted edge into its former shape, so that it is ready to flay another plate, one skin at a time. ”

“ By solitude we mean entire separation from news of the world, and the inability to get into touch with people far away. On the remote ranches of the United States, in sequestered Norwegian fiords, in the folds of the eternal hills where the only other living creature is the eagle, man may still be as conversant with what is going on in China or Peru as if he were living in the busy streets of a capital town. The electric wire is the magic news-bringer. Wherever man can go it can go too, and also into many places besides. ”

“ The taunt of unreliability once levelled—and with justice—at the motor-car, is fast losing its force, owing to the vast improvements in design and details which manufacturers have been stimulated to make. The motor-car industry has a great future before it, and the prizes therein are such as to tempt both inventor and engineer. Every week scores of patents are granted for devices which aim at the perfection of some part of a car, its tyres, its wheels, or its engines. ”

“ You have learnt by sad experience that water, which seems to offer so little resistance to a body drawn slowly through it, is remarkably hard if struck violently. In fact, if enclosed, it becomes more incompressible than steel, without in any way losing its fluidity. We possess in water, therefore, a very useful agent for transmitting energy from one point to another. Shove one end of a column of water, and it gives a push to anything at its other end; but then it must be enclosed in a tube to guide its operation. ”

“ The razor he shaves with, the mirror which helps him in the operation, the very brush and soap, all are machine-made. With his clothes he adds to the burden of his indebtedness to mechanism. The power-loom span the linen for his shirts, the cloth for his outer garments. Shirts and collars are glossy from the treatment of the steam laundry, where machinery is rampant. His boots, kept shapely by machine-made lasts, should remind him that mechanical devices have played a large part in their manufacture, very possibly the human hand has scarcely had a single duty to perform. ”

“ There were neither planing, slotting, nor shaping machines, and with the exception of very imperfect lathes and a few drills, the preparatory operations of construction were effected entirely by the hands of the workmen. Now, everything is done by machine tools, with a degree of accuracy which the unaided hand could never accomplish. The automaton, or self-acting, machine tool has within itself an almost creative power; in fact, so great are its powers of adaptation, that there is no operation of the human hand that it does not imitate. ”

“ If you consider a moment, you will soon build up a formidable list of objects in which circularity is a necessary or desirable feature—wheels, shafts, plates, legs of tables, walking-sticks, pillars, parts of instruments, wire, and so on. The Hindu turner, whose assistant revolves with a string a wooden block centred between two short spiked posts let into the ground, while he himself applies the tool, is at one end of the scale of lathe users; at the other, we have the workman who tends the giant machine slowly shaping the exterior of a 12-inch gun, a propeller shaft, or a marble column. ”

“ A second great step in advance was the employment of machinery, which, when once fashioned by hand, saved an enormous amount of time and trouble—the pump, the blowing bellows, the spinning-wheel, the loom. But all had to be operated by human effort, sometimes replaced by animal power. ”

“ Others, again, are built on the verge of a pit, so that they may cut the edges of an up-ended plate, and make it fit against its fellows so truly that you could not slip a sheet of paper edgeways between them. Thus has man, so frail and delicate in himself, shaped metal till it can torture its kind to suit his will, which he makes known to it by opening this valve or pulling on that lever. ”

“ But in a factory where a thousand horse-power is required all day long, the extra pence make a big total. If, therefore, the proprietor finds that a shilling's-worth of gas or oil does a quarter as much work again as a shilling's-worth of coal, and that either form of fuel is easily obtained, you may be sure that, so far as economy is concerned, he will make up his mind without difficulty as to the class of engine to be employed. A pound of coal burnt under the best type of steam-engine gives but 10 per cent. ”

“ So the motor buses are crowded, while the horsed rivals on the same route trundle along half empty. Since the one class of vehicles can travel at an average pace of ten miles an hour, as against the four miles an hour of the other, no wonder that this should be so. Even if the running costs of a motor bus for a given distance exceed that of an electric tram, we must remember that, whereas a bus runs on already existing roads, an immense amount of capital must be sunk in laying the track for the tram, and the interest on this sum has to be added to the total running costs. ”

“ There are signs that the most deadly arm of the future will be the automatic rifle. Perhaps a pattern even lighter than the Rexer may appear. If every unit of a large force could fire 300 rounds a minute, and ammunition were plentiful, we could hardly imagine an assault in which the attacking party would not be wiped out, even if similarly armed; for with the perfection of firearms the man behind cover gets an ever-increasing advantage over his adversary advancing across the open. ”

“ A fender would be dearer than it is were not the iron ore cheaply transported from mine to rail, from rail to the smelting furnace, from the ground to the top of the furnace. In short, to whatever industry we look, in which large quantities of raw or finished material have to be moved, stored, and distributed, the mechanical conveyer has supplanted human labour to such an extent that in lack of such devices we can scarcely conceive how the industry could be conducted without either proving ruinous to the people who control it or enhancing prices enormously. ”

“ And few dwellers in large cities have not heard the cry of the firemen, as it rises from an indistinct murmur into a loud shout, before which the traffic, however dense, melts away to the side of the road and leaves a clear passage for the engines, driven at high speed and yet with such skill that accidents are of rare occurrence. ”

“ A big factory houses the parents which send out their children to careers of usefulness throughout the world. We often forget, in our admiration of the offspring, the source from which they originated. Our bicycles, so admirably adapted to easy locomotion, owe their existence to a hundred delicate machines. The express engine, hurrying forward over the iron way, is but an assemblage of parts which have been beaten, cut, twisted, planed, and [61] otherwise handled by mighty machines, each as wonderful as the locomotive itself. ”

“ A carrier, from which are slung the sacks of coal, is hauled backwards and forwards by steel ropes stretching between the foremast of the transport and a mast rigged on the warship.
Just as a competitor in a long-distance race takes his nourishment without halting, so should a battleship be able to coal "on the wing." The task of transferring so many tons of the mineral from one ship's hold to that of another may seem easy enough to the inexperienced critic, and under favourable conditions it might not be attended by great difficulty. ”

“ As children we watched the blacksmith at his anvil, attracted and yet half-terrified by the spark-showers flying from a white-hot horseshoe. And even the adult, long used to startling sights, might well be fascinated and dismayed by the terrific blows dealt on glowing ingots by the mechanical sledge.
A steam hammer at work in Woolwich Arsenal, forging a steel ingot for the inner tube of a big gun. It delivers a blow equivalent to the momentum of a falling mass weighing 4000 tons. ”

“ Having seen the various operations which a cylinder has to go through, we pass into another shop given up to long lines of benches where various motor parts are being completed. Each piece, however small, is treated as of the utmost importance, since the failure of even a tiny pin may bring the largest car to a standstill. We see a man testing pump discs against a standard template to prove their absolute accuracy. Close by, another man is finishing a fly-wheel, chipping off specks of metal to make the balance true. ”

“ A fire given fifteen minutes' start is often hard to overtake. Imagine a warehouse alight on three floors before the alarm is raised! Engines may come one after another and pour deluges of water on the flames, yet as likely as not we read next morning of "total destruction." No stitch in time has saved nine!
The sad part about fires is that they represent so much absolute waste. In commercial transactions, if one party loses the other gains; wealth is merely transferred, and still remains in the community. ”

“ On every side are fresh wonders. Here is an immense rolling machine, fed with plates 27 feet wide, which bends the 1 1 / 8 -inch thick metal as if it were so much pastry; or turns over the edges neatly at the command of a 50 h.p. motor. There we have an electric plate-planer scraping the surface of a sheet half the length of a cricket pitch. As soon as a stroke is finished the bed reverses automatically, while the tool turns over to offer its edge to the metal approaching from the other side. ”