40 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



imagine that the destinies of mankind, for centuries to come, can be seriously 

 affected, much less determined, by the men of this generation in the United 

 States." 



The nineteenth century has been the first distinctively machine- 

 using period. Until heat-motors could be found, it was impracticable to 

 employ machinery in any very great extent in the performance of the 

 work of the world. Until entire freedom of the worker could be as- 

 sured, enabling him to devise and to find means of constructing machin- 

 ery, inventions could not find general use. Until the machines for ma- 

 chine-making could be had, the general use of machinery could not be 

 secured, simply because the finer classes of machinery could not be ac- 

 curately and satisfactorily made. Until the modern system of manu- 

 facturing and of working to gauge, and of interchangeable parts, could 

 be adopted, the production of an industrial system for mechanical pro- 

 duction was not practicable. Thus all kinds of mechanisms and every 

 department of invention waited upon every other until, nearing the be- 

 ginning of the nineteenth century, the long-delayed conjunction was 

 attained, the beginning of the machine-using age introduced a new era, 

 and the world took a sudden leap forward; thenceforward advancing 

 with a continuous acceleration. Then came a machine-using world. 

 Then one man became equal, in productive power, to two or five, or 

 sometimes to ten, or even to a hundred, lacking the aid of the machine. 

 For the first time in the history of mankind, a real, permanent, rapid 

 and rapidly increasing progress began. One man then became able to 

 do the work of four of his predecessors in making agricultural ma- 

 chinery, and he made it incomparably better; one man could do the 

 work of fifty in making gun-stocks, after the Blanchard lathe for turn- 

 ing irregular forms had been adapted to the task of aiding him. One 

 man does the work of six in boot and shoe making; in some departments 

 of textile manufacture one man with his machinery does the work of a 

 hundred of earlier generations. In fact, the earlier generations from 

 prehistoric days have no record of any very important progress. Each 

 man, with his modern newspaper-printing press, taking its paper from 

 its miles of rolls, printing, cutting into sheets, pasting together, folding 

 and piling ready for the carrier, does the work that five hundred men 

 would have been employed to do a century earlier, and then it would 

 have been a work very badly done, as gauged by our standards. Mr. 

 Wright reckons that the machinery of the United States gives the 

 power of doing work that, without it, would require the labor of a 

 hundred millions of workers; thus multiplying the average work of the 

 average individual worker by about six.* In a very large proportion of 

 the later developments, especially in the application of steam-power, 



* 'Industrial History of the United States'; Chautauqua-Century Press, 1895. 



