Obsolescence

“ Moreover, it is the practical embodiment of inventions which produces obsolescence; and business conditions determine even more largely the time and the extent to which new inventions are embodied in improved machines. The march toward inadequacy, as distinguished from obsolescence, is likewise erratic.
The protestants point out that uncertainty is incident also to the second step in the process of fixing the appropriate depreciation charge. A plant unit rarely remains in service until consumed physically. ”

“ The process of obsolescence is even less predictable. Advances in the arts are constantly being made which would require retirement at some time, even if the unit were endowed with perpetual physical life. ”

“ Not only must the depreciation of use, i.e., wear and tear and lapse of time, be considered but also obsolescence and inadequacy as factors in shortening the service life of the structure.
Buildings used for some purposes deteriorate more rapidly than when put to other uses. Vibrations, whether caused by own use or due to exterior causes, increase the rapidity of deterioration. Susceptibility to fire, explosion, and the like, due to the nature of their use, should be taken into account. ”

“ The building that we do annually is not of clear gain, for we are constantly losing old buildings by fire, obsolescence or demolition. A comparative study of the statistics of new building construction along with increased population shows that in late years the additions have fallen short of the requirements of the growth in population. ”

“ Broadly speaking, depreciation is the loss, not restored by current maintenance, which is due to all the factors causing the ultimate retirement of the property. These factors embrace wear and tear, decay, inadequacy, and obsolescence. [19] Annual depreciation is the loss which takes place in a year. In determining reasonable rates for supplying public service, it is proper to include in the operating expenses, that is, in the cost of producing the service, an allowance for consumption of capital in order to maintain the integrity of the investment in the service rendered. ”

“ In the course of 30 years under this arrangement, most construction and production would undergo a fundamental change for the better, as old, dilapidated and obsolete buildings and machines disappeared and new ones appeared in their place. ”

“ During this period some manufactured commodities would have been destroyed and replaced 15 times, others 10 times, still others 5 times, etc., depending on the span of life allotted to each, in order for it to earn sufficient for its purpose before it dies. ”

“ And, when capital purchases the automobile or the building, it will be doing so only for that limited period of years, after which the remaining value left in the product will revert to labor, which produced it in the first place, and which thus will receive its rightful share in the end, even if it did not do so in the beginning.
Miracles do not happen. They must be planned in order to occur. Similarly in this time of economic crisis, we must work out our own salvation. ”

“ It is far cheaper to destroy useless and obsolete goods now, and perhaps some of our synthetic wealth as well, than to risk destroying far more priceless assets, such as [Pg 17] human life, and undermining the health and confidence of the people, by continuing to fight the depression with our old, slow and costly methods. ”

“ To start business going and employ people in the manufacture of things, it would be necessary to destroy such things in the beginning—but for the first time only. After the first sweeping up process necessary to clean away obsolete products in use today, the system would work smoothly in the future, without loss or harm to anybody. ”

“ Society is suffering untold loss in foregoing the workpower of ten million human beings. The present deadlock is the inevitable result of traveling along blind alleys. Chaos must unavoidably flow from an unplanned economic existence. ”

“ New products would constantly be pouring forth from the factories and marketplaces, to take the place of the obsolete, and the wheels of industry would be kept going and employment regularized and assured for the masses. ”

“ Wouldn’t it be profitable to spend a sum of—say—two billion dollars to buy up, immediately, obsolete and useless [Pg 7] buildings, machinery, automobiles and other outworn junk, and in their place create from twenty to thirty billion dollars worth of work in the construction field and in the factory? Such a process would put the entire country on the road to recovery and eventually would restore normal employment and business prosperity. ”

“ So, too, the paralysis which prevents our economic society from consuming the abundant supplies of raw materials and manufactured commodities which glut our markets must be cured before normal conditions can be restored.
Furniture and clothing and other commodities should have a span of life, just as humans have. ”

“ I would have the Government assign a lease of life to shoes and homes and machines, to all products of manufacture, mining and agriculture, when they are first created, and they would be sold and used with the term of their existence definitely known by the consumer. ”

“ These are obstructing the avenues of commerce and industry and are preventing new products from coming through. There is little demand for new goods when people make their old and worn-out things do, by keeping them longer than they should. ”

“ The Government should be enabled to advance a sum of money to certain Trust Agencies to purchase part of these obsolete buildings and machines and clothing. They should be thrown into a junk pile, and money lent toward creating new buildings, machines and commodities. ”

“ If we can afford to sink ships, that cost millions of dollars to construct, merely for the purpose of giving [Pg 14] target practice to the gunner, then surely we can afford to destroy other obsolete and useless products in order to give work to millions and pull the country out of the dire catastrophe in which it is now wallowing. ”

“ Factories, warehouses, and fields are still intact and are ready to produce in unlimited quantities, but the urge to go ahead has been paralyzed by a decline in buying power. The existing troubles are man-made, and the remedies must be man-conceived and man-executed. ”

“ The essential and bitter irony of the present depression lies in the fact that millions of persons are deprived of a satisfactory standard of living at a time when the granaries and warehouses of the world are overstuffed [Pg 4] with surplus supplies, which have so broken the price level as to make new production unattractive and unprofitable. ”

“ Carefully repaired, when the weakness is noticed at all, it can bear a little more, and again a little, but at last the breaking strain is reached, the tall building totters, the highest pinnacles topple over, then the upper story collapses, and the end comes either in the crash of a great falling or, by degrees, in the irreparable ruin of ages. But when all is over, and wind and weather and time have swept away what they can, parts of the original foundation still stand up rough and heavy, on which a younger and smaller people must build their new dwelling, if they build at all. ”

“ The building, which is the mere modern shell, of no interest, and often of no beauty, is the master of the collection, which is restrained and crippled by such conditions that its use is impaired and its growth is stopped. The past is vanishing before our modern changes yearly and daily. There is ever less and less to preserve. And everything possible must be garnered before it has entirely vanished. The present has its most serious duty to history in saving the past for the benefit of the future. ”

“ To close a factory is to hasten the time when buildings and machinery will be piled upon the rubbish heap. The most magnificent and solid works of man have crumbled under the finger of time. The earth is strewn with ruins of gigantic engineering works, aqueducts, canals, temples, and monuments, whose restoration would be no less a task than was their first building. Everywhere vigilance and repairs are the conditions of continued uses of wealth. ”

“ But those who make the changes wrought in our day under the name of Restoration, while professing to bring back a building to the best time of its history, have no guide but each his own individual whim to point out to them what is admirable and what contemptible: while the very nature of their task compels them to destroy something, and to supply the gap by imagining what the earlier builders should or might have done. Moreover, in the course of this double process of destruction and addition, the whole surface of the building is necessarily tampered with ”

“ All these vast cities have given way and gone, even as my native Potteries and the Black Country have gone, and the lives that were caught, crippled, starved, and maimed amidst their labyrinths, their forgotten and neglected maladjustments, and their vast, inhuman, ill-conceived industrial machinery have escaped--to life. ”

“ Of all the Restorations yet undertaken the worst have meant the reckless stripping a building of some of its most interesting material features; while the best have their exact analogy in the Restoration of an old picture, where the partly perished work of the ancient craftsmaster has been made neat and smooth by the tricky hand of some unoriginal and thoughtless hack of to-day. ”

“ If these things are so, may not the knowledge of this power of points be of use to mankind in preserving houses, churches, ships, etc., from the stroke of lightning, by directing us to fix on the highest part of those edifices upright rods of iron made sharp as a needle, and gilt to prevent rusting, and from the foot of those rods a wire down the outside of the building into the ground, or down round one of the shrouds of a ship, and down her side till it reaches the water? ”

“ Modern industry, working for the masses, goes on destroying the creations of ancient art, the works of which were once as personal to the consumer as to the artisan. Nowadays we have products, we no longer have works. Public buildings, monuments of the past, count for much in the phenomena of retrospection; but the monuments of modern industry are freestone quarries, saltpetre mines, cotton factories. ”

“ But the chemical powers, inherent in matter, soon bring forth new forms of beauty from the ruins; and, in fact, throughout all nature, the process of renovation usually counterbalances that of destruction; and thus far, indeed, the former has done more than this; for every time nature has changed her dress in past ages, she has put on more lovely robes, and a fresher countenance. Can we doubt that this same principle of change, operating, as it does, on a stupendous scale through the universe, is one of the great means of its preservation? ”

“ Deep shafts have been sunk in the rocks; labyrinths of underground galleries have been dug out where coal may be raised or minerals extracted. At the crossings of the highways great cities have sprung up, and within their borders all the treasures of industry, science, and art have been accumulated.
Whole generations, that lived and died in misery, oppressed and ill-treated by their masters, and worn out by toil, have handed on this immense inheritance to our century. ”

“ Instead of a smiling landscape, everywhere exhibiting the traces of agricultural skill and laborious and patient industry, a prospect of universal desolation met the eye of the anxious and hurrying wayfarer. Moss-grown heaps of rubbish alone marked the site of many a once flourishing and opulent city. The towering aqueducts,—those engineering marvels of the ancient world,—whose majestic ruins still excite the admiration of all mankind, were broken and fallen into decay. ”

“ It is startling to think how slight the traces that would be left of our civilization did it pass through the throes that have accompanied the decline of every previous civilization. Paper will not last like parchment, nor are our most massive buildings and monuments to be compared in solidity with the rock-hewn temples and titanic edifices of the old civilizations. And invention has given us not merely the steam engine and the printing press, but petroleum, nitroglycerine and dynamite. ”

“ This point of view pervades everything, from imperial palaces to the tiniest of children’s toys, from temples and pagodas to water-jars and mud jugs; almost all of them are flimsy or easily destructible, whether by use, time, or the elements. The result is that the country from beginning to end is in a constant state of half-ruin or dismal disrepair, for the average life of most structures is so short that while one is being built up again another is sure to have fallen down. ”

“ Year by year, as we made our homes afresh in accordance with the saner needs of our new social families, we swept away more and more of those horrible structures, the ancient residential houses, hastily built, without imagination, without beauty, without common honesty, without even comfort or convenience, in which the early twentieth century had sheltered until scarcely one remained; we save nothing but what was beautiful or interesting out of all their gaunt and melancholy abundance. ”

“ But these ruins speak not only of the mechanical skill and physical greatness of that vanished people, but also of their refinement and their acquaintance with the deeply-hidden laws of hygiene; for they well knew what has become known to us only after a lapse of twenty centuries, after the measurement of the heavens, and the discovery of the steam-engine, that for every large city an abundant supply of pure, fresh water is indispensable to the preservation of health. ”

“ Under the same desperate compulsion of commercial competition, agriculture declines and the country-side is deserted. The old country life with its festivals and picturesque customs has disappeared. Old houses, churches, and cottages have tumbled into ruin, or have suffered worse destruction by a process of smartening-up called “restoration.” ”