Even the most casual review of the technological situation in Europe, say in the seventeenth century, will bring out characteristic features that cannot be denied honourable mention as applications of mechanical science, although the reserve caution is immediately to be entered that these early mechanical expedients and their employment stand out as sporadic facts of mechanical contrivance in an age of manual work, rather than as characteristic traits of the industrial system in which they are found. The beginnings of the machine industry are of this sporadic character. They come up as an outgrowth of the handicraft technology, particularly at conjunctures where that technology is called on to deal with such large mechanical problems as exceed the force of manual labour or that elude the reach of the craftsman’s tools.
So, e. g., in England, say from the sixteenth century onward, there are improvements in highways and waterways and in the drainage of agricultural lands; and, as an instance more obviously related to the machine industry as commonly apprehended, there comes early in the eighteenth century the “horse-hoing cultivation” on which Jethro Tull spent his enthusiasm. Along with this obviously mechanical line of endeavour and innovation is also to be noted the deliberate efforts to improve the races of sheep and cattle that were in progress about the same time. These are perhaps not to be rated as mechanical inventions in the simple and obvious sense of the phrase, but they have this trait in common with the inventions of the machine era that they turn ascertained facts of brute nature to account for human use by a logic that has much of that character of impersonal incidence that marks the machine technology. The machine industry comes on gradually; its initial stages are visible in the early eighteenth century, but it is only toward the close of that century that its effects on the industrial system become so pronounced that the era of the machine technology may fairly be said to have set in; and it is only in Great Britain that it can be said to prevail at that period.
Of the other features above alluded to as characteristic of this period of history none are of so substantial a character or so distinctive of this particular period as its technological peculiarities. Free competition, e. g., belongs as much to the era of handicraft as to that of the machine, having prevailed—more extensively in theory than in practice—under the former régime as under the latter; and in point of fact it gradually falls under increasing restrictions as the machine age advances, until in the more highly developed phases of the current situation it has largely ceased to be a practicable line of policy in industrial business. So, also, Capitalism did not take its rise coincident with the industrial revolution, although its best development and largest expansion may lie within the machine age. It had its beginnings in the prosperous days of handicraft, and one capitalistic era had already run its course, on the Continent, before the machine industry came in. The “credit economy,” associated with the capitalistic management of industry, is also of older growth, so far as regards the days of its early vigour, although the larger and more far-reaching developments of credit come effectually into play only in the later decades of the machine age. Much the same is true of the so-called large-scale organisation of industry and the factory system. Its highest development comes with the advanced stages of the machine technology and is manifestly conditioned by the latter, but it was already a force to be counted with at the time of the industrial revolution. The large-scale industry contemplated, with a degree of apprehension, by Adam Smith, e. g., was not based on the machine technology but on handicraft with an extensive division of labour, and on the “household industry” as that was gaining ground in his time. The latter was, in form, what has since come to be known as the “sweatshop” industry.
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In this new era technology comes into close touch with science; both the science and the technology of the new age being of a matter-of-fact character, beyond all precedent. So much so that by contrast, the technology of handicraft would appear to have stood in no close or consistent relation with the avowed science of its time. Not that anthropomorphic imputation is altogether wanting or inoperative in this latterday scientific inquiry, or in the technological utilisation of the facts in hand; but in the later conceptions anthropomorphism has at the best been repressed and sterilised in an unprecedented degree. And it holds true for the machine technology beyond any other state of the industrial arts that the facts of observation can effectually be turned to account only in so far as they are apprehended in a matter-of-fact way. The logic of this technology, by which its problems are to be worked out, is the logic of a mechanical process in which no personal or teleological factors enter. The engineer or inventor who designs processes, appliances and expedients within these premises is required to apprehend and appreciate the working facts after that dispassionate, opaque, unteleological fashion in which the phenomena of brute matter occur; and he must learn to work out their uses by the logic of brute matter instead of construing them by imputation and by analogy with the manifestations of human workmanship. Less imperatively, but still in a marked degree, the same spirit must be found in the workmen under whose tendance these processes and appliances are to work out the designed results.
Under the simpler technology of more primitive industrial systems recourse to anthropomorphic imputation has also always been a hindrance to workmanlike mastery, more particularly in the mechanic arts proper, and only less pronounced in those industrial arts, like husbandry, that have to do immediately with plants and animals. Knowledge of brute facts as interpreted in terms of human nature appears never to have been serviceable in full proportion to their content. But in these more primitive industrial systems—as also in the better days of handicraft—the workman is forever in instant control of his tools and materials; the movements made use of in the work are essentially of the nature of manipulation, in which the workman adroitly coerces the materials into shapes and relations that will answer his purpose, and in which also nothing (typically) takes place beyond the manual reach of the workman as extended by the tools which his hands make use of. Under these conditions it is a matter of relatively slight effect whether the workman does or does not rate the objects which he uses as tools and materials in quasi-personal terms or imputes to them a degree of self-direction, since they are at no point allowed to escape his manual reach and are by direct communication of his force, dexterity and judgment coerced into the forms, motions and spatial dispositions aimed at by him. His imputing some bias, bent, initiative or spiritual force or infirmity to brute matter will doubtless incapacitate him by so much for efficiently designing processes and uses for the available material facts; his creative imagination proceeds on mistaken premises and goes wrong in so far; and so this anthropomorphic interpretation must always count as a material drawback to technological mastery of the available resources and in some degree retard the possible advance in the industrial arts. But within the premises given by the industrial arts as they stand, he may still do effective work as a mechanic skilled in the manual operations prescribed by the given state of the arts. For in the mechanic industries of all these other and more archaic industrial systems the workman does the work; it may be by use of tools, and even by help of more or less extended processes in which natural forces of growth, fermentation, decay, and the like, play a material part; but the decisive fact remains that the motions and operations of such manual industry take effect at his hands and by way of his muscular force and manual reach. Where natural processes, as those of growth, fermentation or combustion, are drawn into the routine of industry, they lie, as natural processes, beyond his discretionary control; at the most he puts them in train and lets them run, with some hedging and shifting as they go on, to bring them to bear in such a way as shall suit his ends; he takes his precautions with them and then he takes the chance of their coming to the desired issue. They are not, and as he sees the work and its conditions they need not be, within his control in anything like the fashion in which he controls his tools and the materials employed in his manual operations; they work well or ill, and what comes of it is in some degree a matter of his fortune of success or failure, such as comes to the man who has done his best under Providence. In case of a striking outcome for good or ill from the operation of such natural processes the devout craftsman is inclined to rate it as the act of God; very much as does the devout husbandman who depends on rain rather than on irrigation. It is the part of the wise workman in such a case to take what comes, without elation or repining, in so far as these factors of success and failure are not comprised in his presumed workmanlike proficiency.
The matter lies differently in the machine industry. The mechanical processes here engaged are calculable, measurable, and contain no mysterious element of providential ambiguity. In proportion as they work to the best effect, they are capable of theoretical statement, not merely approachable by rule of thumb. The designing engineer takes his measures on the basis of ascertained quantitative fact. He knows the forces employed, and, indeed, he can employ only such as he knows and only so far as he knows them; and he arranges for the processes that are to do the work, with only such calculable margin of error as is due to the ascertained average infirmity of the available materials. He deals with forces and effects standardised in the same opaque terms. He will be proficient in his craft in much the same degree in which he is master of the matter-of-fact logic involved in mechanical processes of pressure, velocity, displacement and the like; not in proportion as he can adroitly impart to the available materials the workmanlike turn of his own manual force and dexterity, nor in the degree in which he may be able shrewdly to guess the run of the season or the variations of temperature and moisture that condition the effectual serviceability of natural processes in handicraft.
The share of the operative workman in the machine industry is (typically) that of an attendant, an assistant, whose duty it is to keep pace with the machine process and to help out with workmanlike manipulation at points where the machine process engaged is incomplete.[139] His work supplements the machine process, rather than makes use of it. On the contrary the machine process makes use of the workman. The ideal mechanical contrivance in this technological system is the automatic machine. Perfection in the machine technology is attained in the degree in which the given process can dispense with manual labour; whereas perfection in the handicraft system means perfection of manual workmanship. It is the part of the workman to know the working of the mechanism with which he is associated and to adapt his movements with mechanical accuracy to its requirement. This demands a degree of intelligence, and much of this work calls for a good deal of special training besides; so that it is still true that the workman is useful somewhat in proportion as he is skilled in the occupation to which the machine industry calls him. In the new era the stress falls rather more decidedly on general intelligence and information, as contrasted with detail mastery of the minutiæ of a trade; so that familiarity with the commonplace technological knowledge of the time is rather more imperative a requirement under the machine technology than under that of handicraft. At the same time this common stock of technological information is greatly larger in the current state of the industrial arts; so much larger in volume, and at the same time so much more exacting in point of accuracy and detail, that this commonplace information that is requisite to any of the skilled occupations can no longer be acquired in the mere workday routine of industry, but is to be had only at the cost of deliberate application and with the help of schools.
On this head, as regards the requirements of industry in the way of general information on the part of the skilled workmen, the contrast is sufficiently marked, e. g., between Elizabethan times and the Victorian age. At the earlier period illiteracy was no obstacle to adequate training in the skilled trades. In the seventeenth century Thomas Mun includes among the peculiar and extraordinary acquirements necessary to eminent success in commerce, matters that are now easily comprised in the ordinary common-school instruction; and in so doing he plainly shows that these acquirements were over and above what was usual or would be thought useful for the common man. Even Adam Smith, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, shrewd observer as he was, does not include any degree of schooling or any similar pursuit of general information among the requisites essential to the efficiency of skilled labour. Even at that date it appears still to have been true that the commonplace information and the general training necessary to a mastery of any one of the crafts lay within so narrow a range that what was needful could all be acquired by hearsay and as an incident to the discipline of apprenticeship. Within a century after the first inception of the machine industry illiteracy had come to be a serious handicap to any skilled mechanic; the range of commonplace information that must habitually be drawn on in the skilled trades had widened to such an extent, and comprised so large a volume of recondite facts, that the ability to read came to have an industrial value; the higher proficiency in any branch of the mechanic arts presumed such an acquaintance with fact and theory as could neither be gained nor maintained without habitual recourse to printed matter. And this line of requirements has been constantly increasing in volume and urgency, as well as in the range of employments to which the demand applies, until it has become a commonplace that no one can now hope to compete for proficiency in the skilled occupations without such schooling as will carry him very appreciably beyond the three R’s that made up the complement of necessary learning for the common man half a century ago.
It follows as a consequence of these large and increasing requirements enforced by the machine technology that the period of preliminary training is necessarily longer, and the schooling demanded for general preparation grows unremittingly more exacting. So that, apart from all question of humanitarian sentiment or of popular fitness for democratic citizenship, it has become a matter of economic expediency, simply as a proposition in technological efficiency at large, to enforce the exemption of children from industrial employment until a later date and to extend their effective school age appreciably beyond what would once have been sufficient to meet all the commonplace requirements of skilled workmanship.[140]