Boring machine

“ Thus we have three systems of executing machine boring: one in which a single machine is used upon a support capable of holding it in any position, so as to be able to bore at any angle, and in which the holes are placed according to the lines of least resistance, as in hand boring. ”

“ The reason that we find the poet, or at least the minor poet, discouraged in a machine age probably is, that there is nothing a minor poet can do in it. Why should nightingales, poppies, and dells expect, in a main trial of strength, to compete with machines? And why should human beings running for their souls in a race with locomotives expect to keep very long from losing their souls?
The reason that most people are discouraged about machinery to-day is that this is what they think a machine civilization is. They whine at the machines. They blame the locomotive. ”

“ So that dream, “to make something of myself,” with a college appended, only made my days in the mill harder to bear. When the sun is warm, and you, yourself are shut in a chilly room, the feeling is intensified tragedy.
But day after day I had to face the thousands of bobbins I had in charge and keep them moving. Thousands of things turning, turning, turning, emptying, emptying, emptying, and requiring quick fingers to keep moving. A fight with a machine is the most cunning torture man can face—when the odds are in favor of the machine. ”

“ Have I not seen tired, mechanical men, whole generations of them, vast mobs of them, the men who have let the machines mow down their souls? The first thing I have come to ask of a man, if he is to be at the head of a machine—whether it is a machine called a factory, or a machine called a Government or a city, or a machine called a nation—is, Is he tired? ”

“ What are all these machines but inanimate mechanisms, things of metal and rubber and quartz. What makes them the monsters they have become?" [103]
I smote my forehead in anger. "What a fool! Now I see it. It's the master machine you're after."
"Exactly," he smilingly agreed. "Overwhelm, destroy this devilish creature of mine, with its unhuman intelligence, and the machines are what they were before: merely obedient slaves."
I pondered that a moment. "And how, may I ask, are you going to force this old Glacier to move." ”

“ Perpetual Motion.
193. Now, amid the crowd of workers smarting from the curse of labour, there rises up every now and then an enthusiast, who seeks to escape by means of an artifice from this insupportable tyranny of work. Why not construct a machine that will go on giving you work without limit without the necessity of being fed in any way. Nature must have some weak point in her armour; there must surely be some way of getting round her; she is only tyrannous on the surface, and in order to stimulate our ingenuity, but will yield with pleasure to the persistence of genius. ”

“ They watch and watch, having no thought but for one thing: should their watchfulness waver, then the machine awakens from its feigned sleep and begins to race, racing itself to pieces. And the machine, having neither head nor brain, with the tension of its watchfulness, sucks and sucks out the brain from the paralysed skull of its watchman, and does not stay, and sucks, and does not stay until a being is hanging to the sucked-out skull, no longer a man and not yet a machine, pumped dry, hollowed out, used up. ”

“ Where slow hand processes then widely prevailed, now the whirr of wheels, the intricate play of almost human-like machines, which need the eye rather than the hand of the mechanic, turn out products in astonishing profusion and phenomenal cheapness, while the “man with the hoe” of the past is everywhere making way for the man with the machine. ”

“ The misfortune is, that there is a vast deal of machinery and putting together, and I am the worst person living for managing it. You know I am impenetrably dull in every thing that requires a grain of common sense. The inventor is to come to me on Friday, and try if he can make me remember my right hand from my left. I could as soon have invented my machine as manage it; yet it has cost me ten guineas, and may cost me as much more as I please for improving it. ”

“ Machines took away sacred routine work from citizens. Eggheads built the machines to disrupt and spread the disease of reason. We are now replacing machines at the rate of a million a week. Soon, all of us will again be united in the happy harmonious brotherhood of labor. And when you see a rusting machine, what you are seeing is another captured Egghead, frothing and fuming in its cage.... ”

“ There are no mistaken calculations, no chances with a machine except a break now and then of no great consequence. A machine never tires, is never hungry, has no heart to make it suffer. It never sleeps, and has no ears to listen to that appeal for “mercy,” which is sent to it. A machine is like Fate. It is Fate, itself. On, on, on, on it [178] clicks, relentlessly, insistently, to the end, in the set time, in the set way! It neither goes one grain too fast or too slow. Once started, it must go on, and on, and on, to the end of the task. Such was the machine against which I wrestled—in vain. ”

“ So the multitude of men and women stand before the cunning machinery of industry, in the pose of helplessness before a mechanical finality. They cannot help feeling that in so far as their special task is involved, the machine has said the last word. The challenge dies out of their work. The brain that has ever been on the quiver of adventurous expectancy relaxes its tension, and the workman moodily or indifferently lets his machine do its perfect work, while his undisciplined, unchallenged thoughts wander freely over external, social, or domestic concerns. ”

“ Indeed, the machine, in general, appeared desirous of avoiding the monotony attendant on a straight-forward movement; the body of the monster, from the groans, sighs, screams, and other various sounds which accompanied its heaving, pitching, and rolling exertions, appearing to belong to some unwieldy and agonised mammoth and to move by its own laborious efforts, instead of being indebted for its progress to the half-dozen quadrupeds hooked to its front projections. ”

“ As a consequence, we indulged in the very unfortunate and often fatal belief that unlimited hours of labor were possible because it was the machines which were doing the work. We overlooked the fact, which we have lately begun to appreciate, that the person who tends the power-driven machine is far more susceptible to exhaustion, is far more open to fatigue and to the poisons that affect the system and that come from over-exertion than ever before. ”

“ Its educative influence, intellectual and moral, upon those concerned with the invention, management, and direction of machine industry, and upon all whose work is about machinery, but who are not detailed machine-tenders, is of a distinctly elevating character. Its effect, however, upon machine-tenders in cases where, by the duration of the working day or the intensity of the physical effort, it exhausts the productive energy of the worker, is to depress vitality and lower him in the scale of humanity by an excessive habit of conformity to the automatic movements of a non-human motor. ”

“ To sit there, watching the machine, knowing that it is driving you insane, and that the machine is causing you physical pain, and that there is nothing that you can do about either—that, Lord of All, is the supreme torture. ”

“ It helped to bring about the collapse of the installment business, which, of course, was soon followed by the breakdown of jobbing and manufacturing.
Whether, in the cosmic view of things, the machine is a blessing to mankind or a curse, is a question for the philosopher. ”

“ The Planing Machine does the work of two hundred men admirably, and pays moderate wages to three or four; the Sewing Machine of moderate cost, performs easily and cheaply the labors of forty seamstresses; but all the seamstresses in the world probably do not own the first machine. And so muscular force, or mere Labor, becomes daily more and more a drug in the market, shivers at the approach of winter, cringes lower and lower at the glance of a machine-lord or landlord, and vainly paces street after street, with weary limbs and sinking heart, in quest of “something to do.” ”

“ And, near the god-machines, the slaves of the god-machines: the men who were as though crushed between machine companionability and machine solitude. They have no loads to carry: the machine carries the loads. They have not to lift and push: the machine lifts and pushes. They have nothing else to do but eternally one and the same thing, each in this place, each at his machine. ”

“ For the most part, they are the old and the feeble, pale of face and tottering in step. The pursuit of health with them would seem a vain and fruitless effort; the machine appears to have run its destined time, and all the skill of man is unavailing to repair it. ”

“ For in a fully mechanised world there would be no more need to carpenter, to cook, to mend motor-bicycles, etc., than there would be to dig. There is scarcely anything, from catching a whale to carving a cherry stone, that could not conceivably be done by machinery. The machine would even encroach upon the activities we now class as ‘art’; it is doing so already, via the camera and the radio. Mechanise the world as fully as it might be mechanised, and whichever way you turn there will be some machine cutting you off from the chance of working – that is, of living. ”

“ And why should one say that the machine does not live? It breathes, for its breath forms the atmosphere of some towns. It moves with more regularity than man. And has it not a voice? Does not the spindle sing like a merry girl at her work, and the steam engine roar in jolly chorus like a strong artisan handling his lusty tools, and gaining a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s toil?
Nor should the weaving-room be forgotten, where a thousand or fifteen hundred girls may be observed in their coral necklaces working like Penelope in the day-time ”

“ That the cylinders were somehow responsible I felt certain. Man, I thought, had developed the robot, the automatic machine until the human worker was ejected from the industrial process and cast out to degenerate and perish, the beast-men being a surviving remnant of those toilers. This reasoning seemed plausible enough at the time, though it left much to be desired, for, in the twentieth century from which I had come, wasn't the machine replacing human workers with a ruthlessness suggestive of what I found in the future? ”

“ You look at the wrap, and say, "Oh, if I could but have had you on the December night when I went to London by the limited mail, and was nearly starved to death!" But it seems as if the mind must be, to a certain extent, capricious in its action. Caprice, or what looks like it, appears of necessity to go with complicated machinery, even material. The more complicated a machine is, the liker it grows to mind, in the matter of uncertainty and apparent caprice of action. The simplest machine—say a pipe for conveying water—will always act in precisely the same way. ”

“ Here is a much more valuable machine—the human engine—burning perhaps eighty-one per cent more than is needed to accomplish its ends, not through the mistake of its Divine Maker, but through the stupid, short-sighted thoughtlessness of the engineer.
Is not the economy of our vital forces of much greater importance than mechanical or business economy?
It is painful to see a man—thin and pale from the excessive nervous force he has used, and from a whole series of attacks of nervous prostration—speak with contempt of "this method of relaxation." ”

“ Steam machinery is slowly taking out of his hands even this fragment of intelligent work, and he is set at feeding and watching the great machine which has been endowed with the brains that once were in the human toiler. Man is reduced to being the tender upon a steel automaton which thinks and plans and combines with marvelous power, leaving him only the task of supplying it with the raw material, and of oiling and cleansing it. ”

“ The truth is, they were reduced to be themselves sewing machines of an imperfect sort, whose work was sure to be superseded by a machine which cannot suffer, and pine, and grow blind, and drop stitches, and spoil fastenings. It must be a mercy to stop the working of human machines, driven by the force of hunger, and disordered by misery. If the work can be done by an inanimate machine, it ought to be so done; and if the poor women ask what is to become of them, the answer is, that their lot really could not be made worse ”

“ You’re not a man at all, but a nineteenth century machine! You’re run like a motor, from a power house; by the force of conventional thought, over wires of red 121 tape. Fie on you! I thought to meet a human being, not a lifeless thing.” She looked at him steadily, her chin in the air, a world of scorn in her face. “Go on sweating beneath the useless load! Go on building your structure of artificiality that ends centuries from now in nothingness! ”

“ The measure by which we have fallen short of this ideal is the measure of the failure of capitalism as now organized. How far short we have fallen, the stark figures testify. The wealth created by the machine has gone, in appalling disproportion, to the owners of the machine. To the millions of manual workers displaced by the machine, it has given not leisure with the means to enjoy it, but the evil twin of leisure, which is idleness. The perversion of the machine from its proper use has brought about our present condition of unemployment. ”

“ When the model of the machine appeared in the jeweler's window, a fever of excitement took hold of the minds of the people. Every one declared himself either for or against it. Something like a revolution took place. Parties were formed. Men who had no interest in the success of the invention, and in the nature of things could not have, were ready to fight any one who dared to doubt its success. Among the farmers who drove into town to see the new wonder were many who said the machine would not, could not, work. ”