Twentieth Century Inventions: A Forecast

by George Sutherland

INVENTION AND COLLECTIVISM.

The ownership of machinery and of all the varied appliances in the evolution of which inventive genius is exercised is a matter which, strictly speaking, does not belong to the domain of this work. Nevertheless, in endeavouring to forecast the progress of invention during the twentieth century, it is necessary to take count of the risks involved in the inauguration of any public and social economical systems which might tend to stifle freedom of thought and to discourage the efforts of those who have suggestions of industrial improvements to make.

It is plain that those economic forces which prevent the inventor from having his ideas tested must to that extent retard the progress of industrial improvement. Thousands of men, who imagine that they possess the inventive talent in a highly developed degree, are either crack-brained enthusiasts or else utterly unpractical men whose services would never be worth anything at all in the work of attacking difficult mechanical problems. It is in the task of discriminating between this class and the true inventors that many industrial organizers fail. Any economic system which offers inducements to the directors of industrial enterprises to shirk the onerous, and at times very irksome, duty of sifting out the good from the bad must stand condemned not only on account of its wastefulness, but by reason of its baneful effects in the discouragement of inventive genius.

Considerations of this kind lead to the conclusion that during the twentieth century the spread of collectivist or socialistic ideas, and the adoption of methods of State and municipal control of production and transport may have an important bearing upon the progress of civilisation through the adoption of new inventions. Many thinking men and women of the present generation are inclined to believe the twentieth century invention par excellence will be the bringing of all the machinery of production, transport and exchange under the official control of persons appointed by the State or by the municipality, and therefore amenable to the vote of the people. Projects of collectivism are in the air, and high hopes are entertained that the twentieth century will be far more distinctively marked by the revolution which it will witness in the social and industrial organisation of the people than in the improvements effected in the mechanical and other means for extending man's powers over natural forces.

The average official naturally wishes to retain his billet. That is the main motive which governs nearly all his official acts; and in the treatment which he usually accords to the inventor he shows this anxiety perhaps more clearly than in any other class of the actions of his administration. He wants to make no mistakes, but whether he ever scores a distinct and decided success is comparatively a matter of indifference to him. So long as he does not give a handle to his enemies to be used against him, he is fairly contented to go on from year to year in a humdrum style.

Even a man of fine feeling and progressive ideas soon experiences the numbing effects of the routine life after he has been a few years in office. He knows that he will be judged rather on the negative than on the positive principle, that is to say, for the things which it is accounted he ought not to have done rather than for the more enterprising good things which it is admitted he may have done.

Now any one who undertakes to encourage invention must necessarily make mistakes. He may indeed know that one case of brilliant success will make up for half a dozen comparative failures; but he reckons that at any rate the blanks in the chances which he is taking will numerically exceed the prizes. An official, however, will not dare to draw blanks. Better for him to draw nothing at all. He must therefore turn his back upon the inventor and approve of nothing which has not been shown to be a great success elsewhere.

This means that the socialised and municipalised enterprises must always lag behind those depending upon private effort; and the country which imposes disabilities on the latter must, for a time at least, lose its lead in the industrial race. This is what happened to England, as contrasted with the United States, when, under the influence of enthusiasm for future municipalisation, the British Legislature laid heavy penalties upon those who should venture to instal electric trams in the United Kingdom.

The American manufacturers and tramway companies, in their keen competition with one another and perfect freedom to compete on even terms with horse traction, soon took the lead in all matters pertaining to electric traction, and the British public, at the close of the nineteenth century, have had to witness the humiliating spectacle of their own public authorities being forced to import electrical apparatus, and even steam-engines applicable to dynamos used for tramway purposes, from the other side of the Atlantic!

The lesson thus enforced will not in the end be missed, although it may require a considerable time to be fully understood. Officialism is a foe to inventive progress; and whether it exists under a regime of collectivism or under one of autocracy, it must paralyse industrial enterprise to that extent, thus rendering the country which has adopted it liable to be outstripped by its competitors.