Twentieth Century Inventions: A Forecast

by George Sutherland

The true friend of inventive progress is generally the rising competitor in a busy hive of industry where the difficulties of securing a profitable footing are very considerable. Such a man is ever on the watch for an opportunity to gain some leverage by which he may raise himself to a level with older-established or richer competitors. If he be a good employer his workmen enter into the spirit of the competition, feeling that promotion will follow on any services they may render. They may perhaps possess the inventive talent themselves, or they may do even greater services by recognising it in others and co-operating in their work. It is thus that successful inventions are usually started on their useful careers.

It is therefore upon private enterprise that the principal onus of advancing the inventions which will contribute to the progress of the human race in the twentieth century must necessarily fall. The type of man who will cheerfully work pro bono publico, with just as much ardour as he would exhibit when labouring to advance his own interests, may already be found here and there in civilised communities at existing stages of development; but it is not sufficiently numerous to enable the world to dispense with the powerful stimulus of competition.

Just as a superior type of machinery can be elaborated during the course of a single century, there is no doubt that—mainly through the use of improved appliances for lessening the amount of brute force which man needs to exert in his daily avocations—the nervous organisations of the men and women constituting the rank and file during the latter part of the twentieth century will be immensely improved in sensitiveness. A corresponding advance will then take place in the capacity for collectivism. But a human being of the high class demanded for the carrying out of any scheme of State socialism must be bred by a slow improvement during successive generations. A hundred years do not constitute a long period of time in the process of the organic evolution of the human race, and, as Tennyson declared,

We are far from the noon of man—
There is time for the race to grow.

Yet the public advantages of collectivist activities in certain particular directions cannot for a moment be denied. Much waste and heavy loss are entailed by the duplication of works of general utility by rival owners, each of them, perhaps, only half utilising the full capacities of his machinery or of the other plant upon which capital has been expended.

Moreover, as soon as companies have become so large that their managers and other officials are brought into no closer personal relations with the shareholders than the town clerks, engineers, and surveyors of cities, and the departmental heads of State bureaus are associated with the voters and ratepayers, the systems of private and of collective ownership begin to stand much more nearly on a par as regards the non-encouragement which they offer to inventiveness.

One of the greatest discoveries of the twentieth century, therefore, will be the adoption of a via media which will admit of the progressiveness of private ownership in promoting industrial inventions, combined with the political progressiveness of collectivism. One direction in which an important factor assisting in the solution of this problem is to be expected is in the removal of the causes which tend to make public officials so timid and unprogressive.

So long as a mere temporary outcry about the apparent non-success of some adopted improvement—whose real value perhaps cannot be proved unless by the exercise of patience—may result in the dismissal or in the disrating of the official who has recommended it, just so long will all those who are called upon to act as guides to public enterprises be compelled to stick to the most conservative lines in the exercise of their duties. More assurance of permanence in positions of public administration is needed.

The man upon whose shoulders rests the responsibility of adopting, or of condemning, new proposals brought before him, ostensibly in the interests of the public welfare, ought to be regarded as being called upon to carry out quasi-judicial functions; and his tenure of office, and his claim to a pension after a busy career, ought not to depend upon the chances of the evanescent politics of the day. If a man has proved, by his close and successful application to the study of his profession—as evinced in the tests which he has passed as a youth and during his subsequent career in subordinate positions—that he is really a lover of hard work, and imbued with conscientious devotion to duty, he may generally be trusted, when he has attained to a position of superintendence, to do his utmost in the interests of the public whom he serves. This is the theory upon which the appointment of a judge in almost any English-speaking community is understood to be made; and, although failures in its application may occur now and then, there is no doubt whatever that on the average of cases it works out well in practice.

If private manufacturers, whose success in life depends upon their appreciation of talent and inventiveness, could be assured that in dealing with public officials they would be brought into contact with men of the standing indicated, instead of being confronted so frequently with the demand for commissions and other kinds of solatium on account of the risks undertaken in recommending anything new, they would soon largely modify their distrust of what is known as collectivism. It is the duty of the public whose servant an official is, rather than of the private manufacturer, to insure him against the danger of losing his position on account of any possible mistake in the exercise of his judgment.