Industrial arts

“ As a textbook, Industrial Arts Design is a practical guide for designing in wood, clay, and base and precious metals. It is intended for individual student use in the High Schools, Normal Schools, and Colleges and as a reference book for elementary school teachers. Its more complex problems are intended as definite helps to the industrial arts designer or craftsman. ”

“ When and in so far as the advanced state of the industrial arts, therefore, made it impracticable for the individual craftsman readily to acquire the material means for work in his craft, any proficiency in the craft would be of no effect except by arrangement with some one who could supply these material means. ”

“ This effectual engrossing of the technological heritage by the owners will extend to any branch of the industrial arts in which so considerable a material equipment is required, in appliances and raw materials, that the workmen who go into this given line of employment cannot practically create or acquire it as they go along. ”

“ Out of the simpler workday familiarity with the raw materials and processes employed in industry, in the lower cultures, there emerges no system of knowledge avowed as such; although in all known instances of such lower cultures the industrial arts have taken on a systematic character, such as often to give rise to definite, extensive and elaborate technological processes as well as to manual and other technological training ”

“ In the main, the state of the industrial arts is always a heritage out of the past; it is always in process of change, perhaps, but the substantial body of it is knowledge that has come down from earlier generations. New elements of insight and proficiency are continually being added and worked into this common stock by the experience and initiative of the current generation, but such novel elements are always and everywhere slight and inconsequential in comparison with the body of technology that has been carried over from the past. ”

“ On the contrary, within this last generation a number of discoveries have taken place in almost all the chief industrial arts, in the opening up of new supplies of raw material, and in the improvement of industrial organisation, which have registered enormous advances of productive power. ”

“ It appears, then, that the accumulation of technological experience is not of itself sufficient to bring out a consecutive improvement of the industrial arts, particularly not such an advance in the industrial arts as is embodied in the machine technology of late-modern times. ”

“ So that hitherto the work of the machine industry has been organised and conducted under a code of legal rights and business principles adapted to the state of the industrial arts which the machine industry has displaced. ”

“ It appears to be loosely correlated with technological150 improvement, so that it sets in when a sufficient ground for it is afforded by the state of the industrial arts, but what constitutes a sufficient ground can apparently not be stated in terms of the industrial arts alone. ”

“ The workmen, labourers, operatives, technologists,—whatever term may best designate that general category of human material through which the community’s technological proficiency functions directly to an industrial effect,—these have to do with the work, whereby they get their livelihood, and their interest as well as the discipline of their workday life converges, in effect on a technologically competent apprehension of material facts. ”

“ Industrial Arts Design develops the principles of industrial design in a new and logical form which, it is believed, will simplify the teaching of craft design. Chapters I to V deal with the elementary problems confronting the designer as he begins the first steps on his working drawing; Chapters VI to VIII show the methods by which he may express his individuality through contour or outline enrichment, while Chapters IX to XVII explain the treatment of the most difficult form of decoration, that of surface enrichment. ”

“ At the same time, any such segregated line of technological gain and transmission, if it has any appreciable significance for the state of the industrial arts and is not wholly made up of ritual observances, leans so greatly on the technological equipment at large that its isolation is at the most partial and one-sided ”

“ Improvement and extension in all lines of stone-working and wood-working industry went forward: except that stone-dressing and masonry are typically absent, owing, no doubt, to the extensive use of woodwork instead.87 Along with this advance in the mechanic arts goes a growing density of population and a wide extension of tillage; until, at the coming of bronze, the evidence shows that these communities were populous, prosperous, and highly skilled in those industrial arts that lay within their technological range. ”

“ The trend of the present demand, a persistent growth of several years, is towards a personal and individual expression in the crafts or industrial arts. This tendency is the natural swing of the pendulum from the machine-made product of the manufactory which in its turn was the inevitable result of mechanical invention. ”

“ Under the simpler technology of more primitive industrial systems recourse to anthropomorphic imputation has also always been a hindrance to workmanlike304 mastery, more particularly in the mechanic arts proper, and only less pronounced in those industrial arts, like husbandry, that have to do immediately with plants and animals. Knowledge of brute facts as interpreted in terms of human nature appears never to have been serviceable in full proportion to their content. ”

“ But through the centuries of its earlier growth the handicraft industry, simply as a routine of workmanship, shaped the conditions of life for the common people more pervasively and consistently than any other one factor. Its discipline, therefore, was of protracted duration and touched the current habits of thought in an intimate and enduring fashion; so as to leave a large and enduring effect on the institutions of the peoples among whom it prevailed. ”

“ Where the pecuniary culture has been carried through consistently on the predatory plan, without being diverted to that commercial phase current in the latterday Western civilisation, the conclusion of the matter has been decay of the industrial arts and effectual dissipation of that system of matter-of-fact knowledge on which technological efficiency rests. ”

“ But the knowledge of drawing, mechanics, mathematics, and chemistry, and other sciences or arts, which aid the artisan in his daily work, may be imparted, and on the spread of such knowledge may depend the continuance of industrial supremacy. ”

“ But as seen from the point of view of technology, and more specifically from that of workmanship as it underlies the technological system, it is best characterised as the era of the machine industry, or of the machine process. ”

“ This tradition never dies out among the organised craftsmen until the industrial system which had so been inaugurated went under in the turmoil of politics and finance or was supplanted by the machine era that grew out of it. ”

“ Technologically, this era is marked by an ever advancing growth of craftsmanship; until it passes over into the régime of the machine industry when its technology had finally outgrown those limitations of handicraft and petty trade that gave it its character as a distinct phase of economic history. ”

“ For in the mechanic industries of all these other and more archaic industrial systems the workman does the work; it may be by use of tools, and even by help of more or less extended processes in which natural forces of growth, fermentation, decay, and the like, play a material part; but the decisive fact remains that the motions and operations of such manual industry take effect at his hands and by way of his muscular force and manual reach. ”

“ The number and variety of these organisations are alone sufficient to imply a tolerably advanced state of industrial activity, although the skill possessed by the artisans cannot have been of a uniformly high order. ”

“ The typical industries, which set the pace for productive work, for competitive gains, and through the standard rates of gain ultimately also for competitive consumption, are industries carried on on a large scale; that is to say they are such as to require a large material equipment, a wide recourse to technological insight and proficiency, and a large draught on the material resources of the community. ”

“ But it follows necessarily that further training in the skilled manipulations of the crafts led to the use of improved and specialised tools as well as to the use of larger appliances useful in the technological processes employed, such as could scarcely be called tools in the simpler sense of the word but would rather be classed as industrial plant. With the advance of technology the material equipment so requisite to the pursuit of industry in the crafts increases in volume, cost and elaboration, and the processes of industry grow extensive and complex ”

“ The discipline of the handicraft industry enforces an habitual apprehension of mechanical forces and processes in terms of manual workmanship,—muscular force and craftsmanlike manipulation. This discipline touches238 first, and most intimately and coercively, the classes engaged in the manual work of industry, but it also necessarily pervades the community at large and gathers in its net all individuals and classes who have to do with the facts of industry, near or remote. ”

“ This reduction of the facts of observation to quantitative and objective terms is perhaps most visible not in the changes that come over the technology of industry directly, in early modern times, but rather in that growth of material science that runs along as a concomitant of the expansion of the mechanical industry during the later era of handicraft. ”

“ It follows by easy consequence that in the practical business conceptions of that time the equipment of material means, which embodies the concern’s assets and affords the ground of its initiative and its rating in the business community, should commonly be rated as the prime mover in industry and the chief productive factor. ”

“ The comparative difficulty of acquiring the mechanic arts, as compared with the arts of husbandry, would appear in much the same light whether it were shown in the relatively slow acquirement of these arts through a home growth of technological mastery or in the relatively tardy and inept borrowing of them from outside. ”

“ The beginnings of the machine industry are of this sporadic character. They come up as an outgrowth of the handicraft technology, particularly at conjunctures where that technology is called on to deal301 with such large mechanical problems as exceed the force of manual labour or that elude the reach of the craftsman’s tools. ”

“ This modern interest in matter-of-fact knowledge and the consequent achievements in material science, comes to an effectual head wherever and so soon, as the handicraft industry has made a considerable advance, in volume and in technological mastery, sufficient to support a fair volume of trade and make thoughtful men passably familiar with the statistical conceptions of the price system. ”

“ The man who does things, who is creatively occupied with fashioning things for use, is the central fact in the scheme of things under the handicraft system, and the range of concepts by use of which the technological problems of that era are worked out is limited by the habit of mind so induced in those who have the work in hand and in those who see it done. The discipline of the crafts inculcates the apprehension of mechanical facts236 and processes in terms of workmanlike endeavour and achievement ”

“ Requirements of an Industrial Problem
In order to start successfully upon a design, it is necessary to know what qualities a good industrial article should possess. Whether one is designing a bird-house, a chocolate set, or a gold pendant, the article must meet three needs: (1) It must be of service to the community or to the individual ”