Machine Age

“ In the space age the man-machine combination not only survives but also flourishes. Arthur C. Clarke writes in a science-fiction story of a legless space man who serves well and happily in the weightlessness of his orbiting satellite station.
We have two stages of development, then, not necessarily sequential: man working with the machine and man as part of the machine. Several writers have suggested a third stage in which the machine gradually supplants the weaker human being much as other forms eased out the dinosaur of old. ”

“ Inventors may 179not be put like engineers, in show windows in front of their machines, but they are all wrought into them. From the first bit of cold steel on the cowcatcher to the little last whiff of breath in the air-brake, they are wrought in—fibre of soul and fibre of body. As the sun and the wind are wrought in the trees and rivers in the mountains, they are there. There is not a machine anywhere, that has not its crowd of men in it, that is not full of laughter and hope and tears. The machines give one some idea, after a few years of listening, of what the inventors’ lives were like. ”

“ Within a decade after that first discovery of the principles of mechanical thought the machine was made that could not only solve problems, but could also originate them. They had developed a brain. It was a great machine, which occupied an entire building, with its massive framework bolted down to the ground.
Man began a rapid decline, for the machines did all his work. With the construction of a machine that could originate a problem, man made a mistake. He had created a machine that was more powerful than he, except that it was immobile. ”

“ The Greek engineer Vitruvius made an interesting observation when he said, “All machinery is generated by Nature and the revolution of the universe guides and controls. Our fathers took precedents from Nature—developed the comforts of life by their inventions. They rendered some things more convenient by machines and their revolutions.” Hindsight and language being what they are, today we can make a nice play on the word “revolution” as applied to the machine. The Antikythera computer was a prime example of what Vitruvius was talking about. ”

“ Men of science took the government of machine-making whose feelings were repugnant to art in any form. They hated to see any effort expended in ornament. With severely utilitarian aims, they banished all appearance of beauty from instruments and tools of all sorts, so that our modern machines, from a steam engine down to a watch, are now models of precise but perfectly unornamented workmanship. They are the fitting implements of a nation that wears trousers and tall hats. ”

“ Where the skill is wanted is to design and make the machinery and watch the cutters, measuring them with microscopic gauges from time to time, and at once remedying them if an edge is found to be a ten-thousandth part of an inch out of place. So that the labour of man is becoming more and more a labour of design and of supervision. Machines are the slaves that do the work, for in a good machine we have an eye and an arm that never tires, and only needs to be kept in working order. But machines are not artistic, and thus art is lost while precision is gained. ”

“ It seems to us quite logical that machines might some day, perhaps in the distant future, be developed to solve for our scientists now apparently insoluble problems. Or they might even be made to state their own problems and work them out—in other words, it might some day be possible to have a machine with almost a working brain. ”

“ People became so accustomed to the perfect functioning of a machine or a clock, so impressed with its regularity and intelligible complexity, that they began to look upon mechanism as a primary thing capable of “explaining” many non-mechanical things, not excluding the phenomena of life. Why should not man himself, the inventor of machinery, be a machine? ”

“ In endowing iron with the cunning of genius and the terrific power of the fabled cyclops, the modern mechanic has revolutionized the field of human effort, transferring it from the foundery and the smithy to the machine-tool shop. It is here, and here alone, that steam-driven machines can be made. They may be conceived in the mind of a Watt or a Stephenson, but they can be made only by the automatic tools of a Maudslay, a Clement, a Bramah, or a Nasmyth. ”

“ Every machine has had the same history—a long record of sleepless nights and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial improvements discovered by several generations of nameless workers, who have added to the original invention these little nothings, without which the most fertile idea would remain fruitless. More than that: every new invention is a synthesis, the resultant of innumerable inventions which have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry. ”

“ When he grows to years of discretion and looks about him to choose a place for himself in life, he finds that that place must come to him out of a machine. By the side of a machine of one sort or another, whether it be of steel rods and wheels or of human beings’ souls, he must find his place in the great whirling system of the order of mortal lives, and somewhere in the system—that is, the Machine—be the ratchet, drive-wheel, belt, or spindle under infinite space, ordained for him to be from the beginning of the world. ”

“ The whole structure of that noble science rests on facts that have been demonstrated to be facts, and the art rests on actions springing from those facts; and neither the science nor the art would now exist, if machines created by engineering skill had been committed to the charge of men unskilled.
It is obvious that the more complicated in construction any machine is, the more time and study are needed to understand it fully; and that the more complicated its method of operation is, the more practice is needed in order to attain skill in operating it. ”

“ They are simply extensions of the human organism, so to speak, limbs immeasurably more powerful, ever more subtle finger-tips, ever more mastery over the invisibly great and the invisibly small. Each new machine needs a new appliance of human skill to construct it, new devices to feed it with material, and often keener-edged faculties to note its registrations or performances. How then can machines supersede us?—they depend upon us. ”

“ The beginnings of the machine-era lie far back, no doubt; but it is only of late, during the past century at the most, that the machine-process can be said to have come into the dominant place in the technological scheme; and it is only later still that its discipline has, even in great part, remodeled the current preconceptions as to the substantial nature of what goes on in the current of phenomena whose changes excite the scientific curiosity. ”

“ All the remaining machines were equally powerful. Any one of them could have built a brain-machine that could easily conquer the others—but it too would have to bow to its creator. They fought it out. ”

“ I want all of you to understand that the machine you will have to take care of is not just an ordinary computer. Every man here has had experience with machinery, from the very simplest to the relatively complex. You know that you have to be careful of the kind of information—the kind of external force—you give a machine.
“If you aim a spaceship at Mars, for instance, and tell it to go through the planet, it might try to obey, but you’d lose the machine in the process.” ”

“ As we move into a technology that embraces communication at a distance of millions of miles, survival under death-dealing radiation, and travel at fantastic speeds, man’s natural equipment falters and he must rely on the machine both as muscle and brain. Intelligence arose from life but does not necessarily need life, in the sense we think of it, to continue. Thus the extension of man’s intellect by electronics as hailed by Dr. Ramo will lead ultimately to our extinction. ”

“ But though certain tools as well as certain forms of human effort are here replaced by machines, these tools are not commonly embodied in the machinery for generating and transmitting the new force, so that the mere consideration of the different part played by the worker in generating productive force does not assist us to distinguish a machine from a tool. A type-writer, a piano, which receive their impulse from the human muscles, must evidently be included among machines. ”

“ Do not let me be misunderstood as living in fear of any actually existing machine; there is probably no known machine which is more than a prototype of future mechanical life. The present machines are to the future as the early Saurians to man ... ”

“ The wealth which a valuable patent promises has been a great incentive to the work of inventors, and has undoubtedly been a chief cause of the great mechanical advancement of the last half century. But the state of mechanical science has greatly changed from what it was when the clause of the Constitution was penned which speaks of inventions as "discoveries." The trained mechanical designer now perfects a machine to do a given work, with almost the same certainty that it will be successful in its operation that he would feel if the machine [90] were an old and familiar one. ”

“ This attempted characterisation of modern scientific inquiry and its working concepts applies immediately to the earlier phases and down to a date well past the advent of the machine industry,—so far past that date as to allow time and experience to work the new habits of thought peculiar to the machine technology into the texture of men’s preconceptions. In time, but tardily, as is the case with the pervasive effects of any new line of habituation, the discipline of the machine has wrought a further, though, hitherto less profound and decisive, change in the aims and methods of science ”

“ Anything which can give life and action goes most rapidly “a-head,” as the phrase is, that is to say, finds most favour with them. In the Patent Office, at Washington, where models are preserved of every machine made in the United States, which has been patented, and which amount, if I am not mistaken, to twelve or fifteen thousand—I remarked that the greater number of them were for the acceleration of speed, and for the saving of time and labour. There were also some for the perpetual movement which——now stand still. Even children seem to feel this passion for moving-machines. ”

“ They commune with humanity in dreams. Happy the man, happy the woman, who awakes the hills of Wessex. For though they sleep, they will never die.'
His voice rose passionately.
'Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. ”

“ Those stories were changed out of all semblance to their foundations, of course, as ever-more-ignorant and ever-more-unsophisticated generations retold them. Perhaps the Golden Age was a garbled memory of a time when machines performed tasks for men—before the machines wore out and could not be replaced without other machines to make them. ”

“ The machines built machines, had been doing it for decades in fact, but now they did one thing more—they designed them. Now the problem could describe the type of machine needed, and the worker machine would design it, and turn out the completed machine! But these machines were rapidly perfecting the beginning that man had made. ”

“ To further compound excuses for the foot-dragging engineer, there was a difference in needs in payroll computation and scientific mathematical calculation. Commercial computers are designed for a high rate of input and output, with a relatively slow arithmetic going on inside. The engineer, on the other hand, might need only several minutes of computer time, but it could take him a couple of days to put the problem into a form the machine could digest. ”

“ This machine technology, with its accompanying discipline in mechanical adaptations and object-lessons, came on gradually and rose to a dominating place in the cultural environment during the closing years of the eighteenth and the course of the nineteenth century; and as fast as men learned to think in terms of technological process, they went on at an. accelerated pace in the further invention of mechanical processes, so that from that time the progress of inventions has been of a cumulative character and has cumulatively heightened the disciplinary force of the machine process. ”

“ The history which we have outlined is undoubtedly the history of the building of this machine, and the knowledge that these complicated machines have been produced as the result of slow growth is of the utmost importance to us. This knowledge gives us at the very start some idea of the nature of the forces which have been at work. It tells us that in searching for these forces we must look for those which have been acting constantly. We must look for forces which produce their effects not by sudden additions to the complication of the machine. ”

“ Only in the period since the adoption of improved forms of steam-engine have we realized the possibilities of machines. They can be applied only to certain classes of work, especially that involving the constant repetition of an operation which can be easily regulated either by the machine itself or by a laborer supervising it. We can use machines, for instance, to make cloth and even to make clothes, but we do not use them in the operations of dressing and undressing. ”