Manual dexterity

“ It is not easy for a person to exactly locate a sound when the cause is not apparent. In short, Mr. Dexter’s operations may be described as only consisting of a little well-managed Dexterity!
A young man “out West,” claiming to be influenced by spirits, astonished people by reading names, telling time by watches, etc., in a dark room. ”

“ To account for this in some degree, I might observe that mechanical dexterity is confined to doing some one particular thing, which you can repeat as often as you please, in which you know whether you succeed or fail, and where the point of perfection consists in succeeding in a given undertaking.—In mechanical efforts, you improve by perpetual practice, and you do so infallibly, because the object to be attained is not a matter of taste or fancy or opinion, but of actual experiment, in which you must either do the thing or not do it. ”

“ Dexter smiled gratefully, his eyes following her movements as she bent over the fire and picked up a lighted brand. But as he watched her come back to him, a glowing ember in her hand, something all at once seemed to go wrong with his eyesight. The girl, the firelight, the ragged line of the thickets, all became hazy and unreal, fading before him. He tried to hold his head erect, but the effort was too great. His eyelids closed like leaden weights, the pipe dropped from his mouth, blackness flooded upon him, and he toppled with a sigh and fell forward upon his face. ”

“ Father! Are you injured?” cried a voice, and a woman, much excited, hurried into the laboratory.
“Not a bit, my dear, not a bit,” replied the professor, as he brushed the dust from his clothes. “Another tube blew up, that's all,” and he seemed as cheerful as though the experiment had succeeded.
“Oh, those horrible, dangerous steam tubes!” exclaimed the lady. Then she saw Larry, and, observing he was a stranger, was about to withdraw.
“This is a reporter from the New York Leader,” explained the scientist. “He has come for a copy of my speech, and it's a good thing he did. ”

“ We now understand that machine tools cannot utterly displace the human hand and eye. The fitters, with touches of the file, remove matter in such minute quantities that its removal might seem of no consequence. ”

“ He knew the value of fingerprint comparisons as a means of tracing criminals.
But Bob knew the brass key had passed through many hands that very morning, since the discovery of the crime. And Hiram’s own fingers and thumbs would have left on the surface marks that would have obliterated any of the whorls, curves and twists of the criminal.
As you doubtless know if you take up a shiny piece of metal in your fingers you will leave on it the impression of the tips, or balls, of your fingers or thumbs, as is also the case if you thus handle a piece of looking-glass. ”

“ Many cars have to take it on the low gear, or go as slowly as possible. Even then it is a strain.
"Suppose we should overtake them there?" suggested Grace.
"Ve'd catch 'em!" exclaimed the German, with a confidence born of admiration for his car.
On and on they chugged. At the foot of the long, steep slope Larry set the levers on second gear, as he did not want to take any chances with the auto. Up and up they went, their eyes strained through the dust for the sight of a green car, for that was the color of the machine in which rode the men who had taken Mr. Potter away. ”

“ Nor will this appear at all strange to those who are acquainted with the variety of movements performed by the different automata, or moving machines fabricated by human industry, and that with help of but few pieces compared with the great multitude of bones, muscles, nerves, arteries, veins, and other parts that are found in the body of each animal. Such persons will look upon this body as a machine made by the hands of God, which is incomparably better arranged, and adequate to movements more admirable than is any machine of human invention. ”

“ Having once conceived this idea, Descartes began a series of dissections and experiments upon the lower animals, to find, if possible, further proof of this general law. To him the human body was simply a machine, a complicated mechanism, whose functions were controlled just as any other piece of machinery. He compared the human body to complicated machinery run by water-falls and complicated pipes. ”

“ I tried several different methods on this line, but all I get is a lot of words as meaningless as those in the cipher.”
“What are you going to do next?”
“I'm going to take out all the words that seem to have any bearing on our matters. I'll set them down, and try to make sense of them.”
Accordingly, with Larry to help, Mr. Newton wrote down the following: blue, marks, ink, farm, door, and deed.
“Those are all that I see that concern us directly,” he said. “There is 'blue,' for the blue-handed man; 'marks,' which he had on his hand; 'ink,' which might refer to Mr. Hosfer's attempts ”

“ You said the chimney was barred inside, and too small for a man to climb down, Bob, but a key could fall down.”
“Yes,” admitted the young detective dryly, “a key would fall down all right, but it would drop in the fireplace, or in the ashes of the fire if one had been built Mr. Beegle says the key was lying close to his hand, and he was on the floor, ten feet away from the hearth. That won’t do, Ned.”
“Couldn’t the key bounce from the brick hearth, over to where Mr. Beegle lay?” asked the lad, who hated to see his theory riddled like this. ”

“ But, though, as I think, there is no doubt that Descartes was the first to propound the fundamental conception of the living body as a physical mechanism, which is the distinctive feature of modern as contrasted with ancient physiology, he was misled by the natural temptation to carry out, in all its details, a parallel between the machines with which he was familiar, such as clocks and pieces of hydraulic apparatus, and the living machine. In all such machines there is a central source of power, and the parts of the machine are merely passive distributors of that power. ”

“ The machinery was adjusted, and the press started, the papers being printed at the rate of many thousands an hour. Thus the last edition came out, about two hours after the accident, with a picture of the scene, and the exploded tank. It was up-to-date newspaper work.
“Well, I guess we've done about all we can to-day,” remarked Mr. Newton, addressing his helpers. “We've covered everything I can think of. I guess we beat some of the other papers. Haven't seen any of them around here yet.”
“It certainly was a bad accident,” remarked Larry, who had never before seen such a terrible one. ”

“ And it is possible, by taking a photograph of these marks, to get a picture of the fingerprints of the person handling the metal or glass. Sometimes prints invisible to the unaided eye are brought out in the photograph.
And by comparing these reproduced prints with the finger marks of criminals on file in all large police headquarters, it is sometimes possible to trace the guilty ones.
But Bob Dexter knew that it would be worse than useless in a case like this, for the reasons I have mentioned. ”

“ I never intended, nor expected, to put the machine to such frivolous uses. I had dedicated it to pure science. But what is science, after all, but a tool which man should use for a better life? And our lives are now affected, Professor. We must use science to solve our own problems."
"Admirably put."
Professor Dexter laid his hand on a huge shining cathode tube, whose terminal ends were clamped in the shining copper embrace of a massive induction coil. ”

“ They were about in the middle of the plains, that dreary bit of road bordered by pine forests on either side when Miss Dexter found she could distinguish the clink, clink or jingle of his watch-chain, a thing of steel links which she knew well by sight as well as by sound as it struck against the buttons of his coat. Slowly Miss Dexter gained on him, until it was necessary either to accost him or pass him. Which did she mean to do? Dark as it was rapidly growing, Mr. Joseph, in half turning his head to observe something in the trees or sky, became conscious of a figure close behind him. ”

“ Yet the machine never takes a new step without a check that the old step was correctly performed. There is, therefore, a chance of better than 99.999,999,999 per cent that the machine will not let a wrong result come out. The automatic checking, of course, does not prevent (1) human mistakes—for example, instructing the machine incorrectly—or (2) mechanical failures, in which the machine stops dead in its tracks, letting no result at all come out. ”

“ Instead of a human offender we have, on this occasion, a leather mannikin. In order to show the machine at its best we will imagine that we have before us a criminal of the most stubborn type. ‘Officer!’” cried the lecturer to someone behind the scenes. “‘Prepare the machine, force 24, minimum celerity.’”
In a tense silence the audience watched the attendant wind the handle, push down the cross-beam, turn round the celerity arrow, and then disappear behind the scenes again.
“Now all is in order,” the lecturer went on, “and the room in which the flogging machine stands is quite empty. ”

“ Homer and the earliest Greek vases show the right was ὲπὶ δόρν, the spear side, and ὲπˋ ὰσπίδα the shield side. ↑ One of the best tests of predominant dextrality or sinistrality is the 'sighting' of a stick to see if it is straight, or the sighting of a gun or pistol. Dextrocularity is largely a dictator of general dextrality. And of dextropedality also, for the dextral is right-footed also. Errors of judgment, however, have been frequent as to the function of the feet. ”

“ To do this is again to recognise the wisdom of preventive measures. An un-oiled, dirty machine will always cause trouble in working, for when the parts do not run smoothly, dropped and uneven stitches are a frequent embarrassment. ”

“ Of these the first is that they could never use words or other signs arranged in such a manner as is competent to us in order to declare our thoughts to others: for we may easily conceive a machine to be so constructed that it emits vocables, and even that it emits some correspondent to the action upon it of external objects which cause a change in its organs ”

“ The starting switches of draw presses are protected by big red tags which have to be removed before the switch can be turned--this prevents the machine being started thoughtlessly. Workmen will wear unsuitable clothing--ties that may be caught in a pulley, flowing sleeves, and all manner of unsuitable articles. The bosses have to watch for that, and they catch most of the offenders. New machines are tested in every way before they are permitted to be installed. As a result we have practically no serious accidents.
Industry needs not exact a human toll. ”

“ As soon as the mischief became apparent, and the remedy was seriously and systematically studied by those competent to deal with the subject, the present regulation was promptly suggested and adopted; just as a skilled mechanic, witnessing the performance of a machine, inadequate by reason of some defect, to accomplish the object for which it had been designed, by the application of his common knowledge and experience perceives the reason of the failure and supplies what is obviously wanting. ”

“ Dexter. The aspect of her own was not just what the young man had expected to see. He did not look upon a countenance blushing in sweet confusion; nor into eyes radiant with loving glances; but upon a pale face, and eyes whose meanings were a mystery. Slowly, yet persistently, did she withdraw her hand from his clasp, while slowly her form arose, until it gained an erect position.
"You have taken me off my guard, Mr. Dexter," she said, a tremor running through her voice.
"Say not a word, Jessie! say not a word! I am only too happy to have taken your heart captive. ”

“ In view of the long continuance and vast preponderance of dextrality it seems strange that the brain preserves all the preformed mechanisms, plastic and ready to make a sinistral child, and the outworking of sinistrality is as prompt, the result as dextrous, as if dextrality had been chosen. The wonder at this is, however, lessened when one notes that all the functions of completed dextrality are at the same time and in the same person now possible to the sinistral; there is a mere difference in the degree not in the kind of expertness. ”

“ He rapidly made a number of other experiments, going through similar performances. He tested the ashes of the paper he had burned, and even applied a small portion of them to his tongue, making a wry face as he did so.
“We are coming on,” he murmured, nodding his head at Mr. Newton and Larry. “We shall be there presently.”
Mindful of the injunction neither of the reporters spoke. They watched Mr. Hosfer with interest.
Finally the experiments were over. The chemist holding a test tube, in which was some violet-colored liquid, came toward them. ”

“ Some parts of the apparatus and modes of action are indeed extraordinary—and, perhaps, none more so than that for ensuring accuracy in the calculated results—the machine actually correcting itself, and rubbing itself back into accuracy, by the friction of the adjacent machinery! When an error is made the wheels become locked and refuse to proceed; thus the machine must go rightly or not at all—an arrangement as nearly resembling volition as anything that brass and steel are likely to accomplish. ”

“ With all the anticipating devices before us, it is apparent that the mere change in the shape of the dies was a minor part of the work involved in so changing the Dennis and York machine as to make it perform a wholly different function, the invention consisting rather in the idea that such change could be made than in making the necessary mechanical alterations. ”