CHAPTER 26
MACHINERY AND LABOR
§ I. EXTENT OF THE USE OF MACHINERY
Tools, machines, and power
1. A machine is a mechanical device by which power is applied in an automatically repeated manner, to change the place or form of things. It is not easy, perhaps not important, to distinguish the machine from the tool in every case. Tools are portions of matter, such as bone, wood, iron, which man guides and directs in applying his energy to things. A machine may be used by the foot, but the hand is the great tool-using member. In many cases there is a clearly marked distinction between tool and machine. A simple, single piece that can be taken into the hand, as a spade, a hammer, a knife, is a tool; a combination of wheels, levers, pulleys, etc., is a machine. The simplest machine is but a slight adaptation of the tool, by which power may be applied in an automatically repeated manner. The drag develops into the cart, a simple machine. The spinning-stick, a tool used in ancient times, developed into the Saxon spinning-wheel of the sixteenth century, the form used when America was colonized. The use of power derived from nature, as that of wind and water and steam, while not the essential mark of machines, is the most characteristic feature of their modern development. Hand-machines, such as the hand-press and the type-writer, have had important industrial results, but it is the use of power leading to the concentration of industry and the ownership of machinery by the employers that has the greatest significance in the modern economic problem.
Machinery brought in an industrial revolution
2. Machinery of many sorts has long been used, but the "age of machinery" begins with the eighteenth century. Inventions, new machines, and new processes, though not frequent, were not unknown in the Middle Ages; but no one class of machines took possession of a whole field of industry and gave rise to a great economic problem by the displacing of labor. The great industrial changes in the Middle Ages generally grew out of political changes, or of changes of routes of trade whereby large industries were disturbed, or of changes in the use of land through new methods and the bringing into use of land in other places. The industrial changes in England at the end of the eighteenth century on the contrary were due mainly to great mechanical inventions. The development of the textile machines for cotton and wool spinning and weaving mark the beginning of the movement. Here for the first time were inventions in such numbers, of such a nature, and under such conditions, that they were rapidly and widely applied, affecting the lives of a great number of workers. The steam-engine at the same time opened up the long line of mechanical inventions by which wood and iron are shaped and wrought, and the iron industry underwent notable developments. Since that time, have taken place in all Western countries that rapid expansion in the use of machines and those notable changes in industrial organization which distinguish our era from all others.