Directness.
A few years ago it was usual to attach pumps, dynamos, and other machinery to their actuating engines by pulleys and belts. To-day in most cases the connection is direct; all the energy which would be absorbed by intervening wheels and leather is saved. In steam-turbines one and the same shaft carries the steam-vanes and the armature of an electrical generator. In saw-mills of modern design a very long steam cylinder is provided with a piston directly attached to the saw carriage. The same principle gives high economy to the steam hammer and pile-driver of Nasmyth. Hammers, drills, cutters and other tools driven by compressed air are directly attached to the rod which holds the piston. In like manner Saunders’ channeling machine, actuated by steam, has its cutters attached to its piston, so that a blow is dealt with no intervening crank-shaft, lever or spring.
Direct, too, is the binding machine for magazines and cheap books, which simply stitches with wire the whole together at the back, as if so many thicknesses of cloth. With the same immediacy we have wall-papers printed directly from the oak or maple they are to represent. Indeed, veneers are now so cheap and good as to be used instead of paper as wall coverings. In the province of art Mr. Hubert Herkomer has accomplished a notable feat in the way of directness, dispensing with the camera, or any of the etcher’s preliminaries of biting or rocking. He paints in monochrome on a copper plate as he would on a panel or canvas, covers his painting with fine bronze powder to harden the surface, from which he then takes an electrotype.
A supreme feat of directness was the invention of a machine which relates itself to art, science and business, the phonograph. Forty years ago Faber constructed a talking machine of bellows to imitate the lungs, with an artificial throat, larynx, and lips affording a weird and faulty imitation of the voice. Edison, bidding sound-waves impress themselves directly on a plastic cylinder, reproduces human tones and other sounds with vastly better effect. Faber sought to copy the method of voice production. Edison set himself the task of taking tones as produced and making them impress a surface from which they can be repeated at will.