The story of American industrial development has no more fascinating or impressive chapter than that devoted to the discoveries and improvements resulting from the extraordinary inventive genius of the New England workman.
He is never content with things as they are. He is forever experimenting—and successfully. He searches until he finds the soul of the machine, and from this intimate acquaintance he begins to eliminate and improve. He accomplishes the paradox of perfecting a perfect article. If there is a practicable way to make one part do the work of two, if some added device will simplify a process or improve a product, he will not rest till he has worked out the problem.
This passion for invention has been from the first a vigorous characteristic of the New England mind. The early settlers were artisans rather than tillers of the soil; and when by a bitter struggle with an undeveloped country they had supplied their immediate wants, they naturally turned again to manufacturing; and this mechanical bent, stimulated to alertness by a vigorous climate, resulted in course of time in an almost incredible mechanical ingenuity—the "Yankee Knack."
This genius for simplification of processes, this wonderful knack of devising machinery which will do the work of the human hand, has multiplied the output of our factories: and this in turn has increased wages and decreased the hours of labor, and so brought a great uplift into the lives of our workmen; given them the power to provide better homes for their families, better education for their children, and greater leisure in which to work out a broader destiny for themselves.
As in the past, so in the present and the future. The "Yankee Knack," which long since turned New England into a vast workshop, is still at its age-long task—simplifying, improving; lowering cost of production, ever raising quality of product—and all to the end that the average American family shall enjoy today what were luxuries but yesterday, and gratify in their turn the yet undiscovered desires of tomorrow.
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