Every-day Science: Volume 6. The Conquest of Nature

by Henry Smith Williams; Edward Huntington Williams

But here again we verge upon the dangerous field of prophecy. Let us turn from it and cast an eye back across the most wonderful of centuries, contrasting the conditions of to-day in each of a half-dozen fields of the world's work, with the conditions that obtained at the close of the eighteenth century. Such a brief survey will show us perhaps more vividly than we could otherwise be shown, how vast has been the progress, how marvelous the development of civilization, in the short decades that have elapsed since the coming of the Age of Steam.

Let us pay heed first to the world of the agriculturist. Could we turn back to the days of our grandparents, we should find farming a very different employment from what it is to-day. For the most part the farmer operated but a few small fields; if he had thirty or forty acres of ploughed land, he found ample employment for his capacities. He ploughed his fields with the aid of either a yoke of oxen or a team of horses; he sowed his grain by hand; he cultivated his corn with a hoe; he reaped his oats and wheat with a cradle—a device but one step removed from a sickle; he threshed his grain with a flail; he ground such portion of it as he needed for his own use with the aid of water power at a neighboring mill; and such portion of it as he sold was transported to market, be it far or near, in wagons that compassed twenty or thirty miles a day at best. As regards live stock, each farmer raised a few cattle, sheep, and hogs, and butchered them to supply his own needs, selling the residue to a local dealer who supplied the non-agricultural portion of the neighborhood. Any live stock intended for a distant market was driven on foot across the country to its destination. Each town and city, therefore, drew almost exclusively for its supply from the immediately surrounding country.

To-day the small farmer has become almost obsolete, and the farms of the eastern states that were the nation's chief source of supply a century ago are largely allowed to lie fallow, it being no longer possible to cultivate them profitably in competition with the rich farm lands of the middle west. In that new home of agriculture, the farm that does not comprise two or three hundred acres is considered small; and large farms are those that number their acres by thousands. The soil is turned by steam ploughs; the grain is sown with mechanical seeders and planters; the corn is cultivated with a horse-drawn machine, having blades that do the work of a dozen men; harvesters drawn by three or four horses sweep over the fields and leave the grain mechanically tied in bundles; the steam thresher places the grain in sacks by hundreds of bushels a day; and this grain is hurried off in steam cars to distant mills and yet more distant markets.

Meantime the raising of live stock has become a special department, with which the farmer who deals in cereals often has no concern. The cattle roam over vast pastures and are herded in the winter for fattening in great droves, and protected from the cold in barns that, when contrasted with the sheds of the old-time farmer, seem almost palatial. When in marketable condition, cattle are no longer slaughtered at the farm, but are transported in cars to one of the few great centres, chief of which are the stock yards of Chicago and of Kansas City. At these centres, slaughter houses and meat-packing houses of stupendous magnitude have been developed, capable of handling millions of animals in a year. From these centres the meat is transported in refrigerator cars to the seaboards, and in refrigerator ships to all parts of the world. Beef that grew on the ranges of the far west may thus be offered for sale in the markets of New England villages, at a price that prohibits local competition.

A more radical metamorphosis in agricultural conditions than all this implies could not well be conceived. And when we recall once more that the agricultural conditions that obtained at the beginning of the nineteenth century were closely similar to those that obtained in each successive age for a hundred preceding centuries, we shall gain a vivid idea of the revolutionizing effects of new methods of work in the most important of industries. It is little wonder that in this short time the world has not solved to the satisfaction of the economists all the new problems thus so suddenly developed.

Turn now to the manufacturing world. In the days of our great-grandparents almost every household was a miniature factory where cotton and wool were spun and the products were woven into cloth. It was not till toward the close of the eighteenth century—just at the time when Watt was perfecting the steam engine—that Arkwright developed the spinning-frame, and his successors elaborated the machinery that made possible the manufacture of cloth in wholesale quantities; and the nineteenth century was well under way before the household production of cloth had been entirely supplanted by factory production. It is nothing less than pitiful to contemplate in imagination our great-great-grandmothers—and all their forebears of the long centuries—drudging away day after day, year in and year out, at the ceaseless task of spinning and weaving—only to produce, as the output of a lifetime of labor, a quantity of cloth equivalent perhaps to what our perfected machine, driven by steam, and manipulated by a factory girl, produces each working hour of every day. Similarly, carpets and quilts were of home manufacture; so were coats and dresses; and shoes were at most the product of the local shoemaker around the corner.

In the kitchen, food was cooked over the coals of a great fireplace or in the brick oven connected with that fireplace. Meat was supplied from a neighboring farm; eggs were the product of the housewife's own poultry yard; the son or daughter of the farmer milked the cow and drove her to and from the pasture; the milk was "set" in pans in the cellar—on a swinging shelf, preferably, to make it inaccessible to the rats; and twice a week the cream was made into butter in a primitive churn, the dasher of which was operated by the vigorous arm of the housewife herself, or by the unwilling arms of some one of her numerous progeny.

To give variety to the dietary, fruits grown in the local garden or orchard were preserved, each in its season, by the industrious housewife, and stored away in the capacious cellar; where also might be found the supply of home-grown potatoes, turnips, carrots, parsnips, and cabbages to provide for the needs of the winter. Fuel to supply the household needs, both for cooking and heating, was cut in the neighboring woodland, and carefully corded in the door-yard, where it provided most uncongenial employment for the youth of the family after school hours and of a Saturday afternoon.

The ashes produced when this wood was burned in the various fireplaces, were not wasted, but were carefully deposited in barrels, from which in due course lye was extracted by the simple process of pouring water over the contents of the barrel. Meantime scraps of fat from the table were collected throughout the winter and preserved with equal care; and in due course on some leisure day in the springtime—heaven knows how a leisure day was ever found in such a scheme of domestic economy!—the lye drawn from the ash-barrels and the scraps of fat were put into a gigantic kettle, underneath which a fire was kindled; with the result that ultimately a supply of soft soap was provided the housewife, with which her entire establishment, progeny included, could be kept in a state of relative cleanness.

The reader of these pages has but to cast his eye about him in the household in which he lives, and contrast the conditions just depicted with those of his every-day life, to realize what change has come over the aspects of household economy in the course of a short century. Nor need he be told in each of the various departments of which the activities are here outlined, that the changes which he observes have been due to the application of machinery in all the essential lines of work in question. We need not pause to detail the multitudinous devices for the economy of household labor which owe their origin to the same agency. There still remains, to be sure, enough of drudgery in the task of the housewife; yet her most strenuous day seems a mere playtime in comparison with the average day of her maternal forebear of three or four generations ago.