Courtesy of Wilshire’s Magazine
REAPING BY HAND AND BY MACHINERY
Such is the state of affairs with agriculture: and now how is it with everything else? In the Thirteenth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labour (1898), Carroll D. Wright has figured the relative costs of doing various pieces of work by hand and by modern machinery. Here are a few of the cases he gives:
“Making of 10 plows: By hand, 2 workmen, performing 11 distinct operations, working a total of 1,180 hours, and paid $54.46. By machine, 52 workmen, 97 operations, 37½ hours, $7.90.
“Making of 500 lbs. of butter: By hand, 3 men, 7 operations, 125 hours, $10.66. By machine, 7 men, 8 operations, 12½ hours, $1.78.
“Making of 500 yds. twilled cottonade: By hand, 3 men, 19 operations 7,534 hours, $135.61. By machine, 252 men, 43 operations, 84 hours, $6.81.
“Making of 100 pairs of cheap boots: By hand, 2 workmen, 83 operations, 1,436 hours, $408.50. By machine, 113 workmen, 122 operations, 154 hours, $35.40.”
Thus we see human labour has been cut to the extent of from eighty to ninety-five per cent. From other sources I have gathered a few facts about the latest machinery. In Pennsylvania, some sheep were shorn and the wool turned into clothing in six hours, four minutes. A steer was killed, its hide tanned, turned into leather and made into shoes in twenty-four hours. The ten million bottles used by the Standard Oil Company every year are now blown by machinery. An electric riveting-machine puts rivets in steel-frame buildings at the rate of two per minute. Two hundred and sixty needles per minute, ten million match-sticks per day, five hundred garments cut per day—each by a machine tended by one little boy. The newest weaving-looms run through the dinner hour and an hour and a half after the factory closes, making cloth with no one to tend them at all. The new basket-machine invented by Mergenthaler, the inventor of the linotype, is now in operation everywhere, “making fruit-baskets, berry-baskets and grape-baskets of a strength and quality never approached by hand labour. Fancy a single machine that will turn out completed berry-baskets at the rate of twelve thousand per day of nine hours’ work! This is at the rate of one thousand three hundred per hour, or over twenty baskets a minute! One girl, operating this machine, does the work of twelve skilled hand operators!”
Since all these wonders are the commonplace facts of modern industry, it is not surprising that here and there men should begin to think about them; here is the naïve question recently asked by the editor of a Montreal newspaper which I happened on:
“With the best of machinery at the present day, one man can produce woollens for three hundred people. One man can produce boots and shoes for one thousand people. One man can produce bread for two hundred people. Yet thousands cannot get woollens, boots and shoes, or bread. There must be some reason for this state of affairs.”