CHAPTER X
The Technology of Physics and Chemistry

AS is well known and has often been described, the machine industry of recent times took its rise by a gradual emergence out of handicraft in England in the eighteenth century. Since then the same industrial arts have progressively been getting the upper hand in all the civilised nations, in much the same degree in which these nations have come to be counted as civilised. There has been a progressive mechanisation of the ways and means of living as well as of the ways and means of productive industry, and this mechanisation has in recent times been going forward at a constantly accelerated rate, and it is still in progress, with no present promise of abatement or conclusion.

Not until the middle of the nineteenth century can it be said that this mechanical industry, and the consequent mechanical organisation of work and life, had got the upper hand in any country outside of Great Britain; although the machine and its procedure had begun to make serious inroads in all those countries that came within the sweep of European commerce. Since then, by progressive diffusion of the machine industry and progressive advance in technology, the state of the industrial arts at large has so far been remodeled that this mechanical industry now stands dominant at the apex of a complex and comprehensive industrial system which includes the civilised world in a net-work of ways and means drawn on a mechanical plan.¹

The mechanical industry, with its technology of physics and chemistry, stands dominant at the apex of the industrial system. So far as the technology of physics and chemistry has taken effect, the industrial system at large has fallen into line as an orderly ramification of productive processes that work together as a rounded and balanced whole, an industrial going concern, a composite of interlocking ways and means organised on an impersonal plan of give and take. It centers about the use of mechanical power and inanimate materials, to be turned to productive account by use of specialised and standardised processes of mechanics and chemistry in charge of technicians and technically skilled workmen. The standardised processes of production according to this mechanistic plan interlock in a moving equilibrium of work, in a sensitively balanced interdependence of supply and output. From which it results that any curtailment, disproportion, or retardation at any point will entail retardation and derangement of the work throughout the system ; and a degree of failure at any point will entail a more than proportionate degree of derangement through all the ramifications of work that are touched by this give and take. Any degree of obstruction or shortage at any critical point will set up a more than proportionate volume of retardation and derangement in the rest of the working mechanism. The due working of the whole or of any part is accordingly conditioned on the due allocation of power-resources and materials, as well as on the unhampered employment of all the available technical insight and man-power. A withdrawal of efficiency at any critical point, in respect of power, materials, man-power, or technical guidance, entails derangement and lowered efficiency of the working whole. Of capital importance among these critical points in the industrial system are the “key industries,” so called because they stand in this critical and commanding relation to the whole.

The later advances in the industrial arts have taken such a turn as to throw the technicians more and more into a position of immediate and unremitting responsibility, in all this mechanical organisation of work. So that the industrial system, drawn on this mechanical plan, will do its work in a competent fashion only on condition that competent technical men are placed in charge of it, at large and in detail, unhampered by other than technical considerations. The industrial system has progressively been taking on this character of mechanical articulation and mechanical intolerance. At the same time, and indeed by the same move, the technicians, in whose habits of thought this state of the industrial arts lives and has its being, have become more and more broadly addicted to the mechanistic logic of the inorganic sciences and more intolerant of all those conventional truths and amenities that lie beyond the borders of tangible fact. Workday preoccupation with these exacting and nicely balanced matters of fact gives them a character of intolerantly impersonal skepticism touching all things that are of the nature of imponderables. It is a constructive skepticism, since the engineer’s work is constructive work, but it is skepticism none the less. They are engaged on contriving and directing ways and means of doing things, but it is ways and means of doing things in space of three dimensions, and the technician’s preoccupations do not lap over into the realm of the imponderables.²

Neither the industrial system nor the brotherhood of technicians, in whose habits of thought this industrial system is contained, have yet reached that unmitigated state of mechanisation and brute logic which this description of it would imply. But it is headed that way and is moving at a constantly accelerated rate. There still are large remnants of old-fashioned human nature in the make-up of the twentieth-century engineer, such as once grew and flourished in the mellower days of handicraft and illiteracy. But then, the engineer is something new under the sun, and that impersonal outlook on things, which his training is likely to entail has not yet had time to be conventionalised into a settled matter of common sense; just as those material sciences of physics and chemistry on which he feeds are also something new, in some degree still alien to the common-sense scheme of things.

In effect, the technician has come up and grown great as a factor in productive industry, has grown to be one of the major institutions in modern life, in very much the same degree and in the same time as the financier, the captain of solvency, has displaced the captain of industry and become the paramount factor in business. So that while the technician is now, and increasingly, the paramount factor in technology, he is by no means master of the industrial system or of the economic situation ; inasmuch as the economic situation is a composite of industry and business, and the conduct of business is not entrusted to the technicians. The technicians and the business men are the outstanding factors in the case, the conjugate foci of the economic system; and the orbit of the economic world now swings about these two foci, which are beginning to draw apart.

An earlier chapter has endeavored to describe the rise, dominance, and eventual decline or disintegration of the Captain of Industry, considered as one of the major institutions of civilised life. As the name implies, he set out with being a pioneer in industrial enterprise, a designer, builder and manager of industrial equipment and a foreman of the work in hand.³ At the same time he was a business man and took care of the financial end of the enterprise, buying and selling, “hiring and firing,” investment and promotion. Presently, as the mechanical industries of which he was a captain grew greater and advanced to a larger scale, with an increasingly detailed and exacting specialisation and standardisation of processes and products, and with an increasing resort to credit, the Captain of Industry under the pressure of circumstances gradually divested himself of his technical or industrial functions and tapered off into a business man of the commercial type. His attention and energies were taken up more and more exclusively with the run of the market, with margins of cost and profit, and especially with the ever increased exactions and opportunities of credit and investment. By the middle of the nineteenth century the captain of industry, considered as a staple article of institutional furniture, had in effect run out or gone in the discard in the British industrial community; and by the same date he had risen into dominance and was beginning to disintegrate in the American world of affairs.⁴ As a “business proposition,” that is to say as a staple requisite among the ways and means of profitable business, the captain of industry was already beginning to shift over into, or to be displaced by, the company promoter, the financial magnate, and the corporation financier. It should scarcely be necessary to trace the course of his disguises and mutations from that point on, through the succeeding half-century of projects, promotions, and corporation finance that has eventually given rise to the captain of solvency, investment-banker, and corporation excuti ve of the twentieth century.

The discontinuance and disintegration of the captain of industry was due to the continued advance of the industrial arts. This advance took such a turn, in the way of specialisation and complexity, that no industrial enterprise of standard size and grade could continue to be competently managed under the divided attention of any one man; divided between the mechanical requirements of the industry and the financial requirements of the business. It was an advance in the scale and complication of equipment and work, in specialisation and standardisation, in applied mechanics and chemistry, which entailed the substitution of technical precision in the place of rule-of-thumb; and along with this progressive change in the technical complexion of the case there was a similarly exacting growth in the business to be done, an increasing volume and an increasing nicety and multiplicity of details. Out of this increasing recourse to detailed, exact, objective knowledge there arose the industrial experts, engineers, technicians, who progressively took over the industrial functions of the captain of industry and left him free to devote his attention to business alone.

In the third quarter of the century chemical science also began to take effect as a material factor in technology, and about the same time electrical science rose into consequence as an industrial force. Chemical processes had of course had their part in the industrial arts before that date, but it had on the whole been a matter of chemical rule-of-thumb rather than of chemical science, of general information and common notoriety rather than exact and calculable processes worked out by detailed experiment and computation in the chemical laboratories. Neither the industrial chemist nor the industrial laboratory had been counted in among the ways and means of production.

Metallurgy, e. g., as well as much of the work in dyeing, tanning, baking, brewing, and the like, have always been of the nature of chemical industry; but it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century and after that these things began to bulk large in the industrial arts and then fell into the hands of the chemical technicians and took their place in the technological scheme as recondite matters of applied science. All these things had been matters of accumulated experience and had held their place in the common sense of the day’s work, along with the familiar use of the mechanical principles and appliances,—familiar in their elements to all men by common notoriety. They were matters which any intelligent layman could understand and turn to account on a footing of workday information helped out by some slight touch of special experience, of the nature of an informal apprenticeship. But by insensible process of growth all these matters of technological use and wont took on a more exacting character, such as gradually to take them out of the untrained reach of businesslike laymen, however ingenious and intelligent, and thereby gave rise to a new factor of production, the technicians, engineers, experts, men grounded in the material sciences and instructed in the specialised application of them.

So the interval since the middle of the nineteenth century stands in contrast to what went before, as a more or less sharply defined period of special growth in the industrial arts, during which the mechanical industry has progressively shifted to a footing of applied science, and during which also the immediate designing and conduct of the work has progressively been taken over by the technicians. At the same time and by force of the same drift of circumstance the captain of industry, the owner-employer, business manager, has progressively been shifted to one side,—to the business side, the “financial end.” Being a layman in matters of industry—that is to say in matters of technically applied science—the business man has perforce become an absentee, an outsider so far as concerns any creative work. Though he is an outsider with a deciding vote on what goes on inside. The “division of labor” has taken this turn. It has progressively eliminated and removed the businesslike layman from the effectual personnel of industry and has progressively vested the effectual management of production in these technical men.

Not that this progressive elimination of the laymen has yet been completed, even as regards responsible work of a technical nature. Indeed, it is still an article of popular belief, grounded in traditional common sense, that the control of productive industry must in the nature of things be entrusted to absentee laymen, even in those lines of production where the work can not effectually be carried on without the constant attention of technically trained men. Even within the mechanical industries the displacement of businesslike laymen by competent technicians has not yet gone so far as to vest full discretion in the technical experts, even in the conduct of mechanical details. At the best or farthest it can be said that the technicians decide in detail what is to be done, if anything, and how it is to be done; while the absentee laymen decide summarily what and how much is not to be done. Such is the state of the case in detail in those lines of production where the mechanical industry has already taken effect in a passably complete degree. But in the large, in what may be called industrial affairs, in the planning and execution of projects that call for a comprehensive technical balancing and articulation of large industrial processes,—in these larger conjunctures, where any lack of technical insight and sobriety will have particularly grave and far-reaching consequences,—there the discretion and control continues to be exercised by absentee laymen who take measures on other than technical grounds.

It will be seen that neither the induction of technicians into the responsible conduct of industry nor the elimination of laymen from work that is of a technical nature is yet nearly complete. Nor, it should be added, is such an outcome desired. It is contrary to common sense and would not be allowed by law and custom. Indeed, it is a safe presumption that any outspoken proposal or project to hasten or precipitate this progressive retirement of businesslike laymen from the superior management of these technical affairs would turn out to be seditious, so soon as the jurisdiction of the courts could be brought to bear on the question. It would involve the abrogation or disallowance, in whole or in part, of the rights of absentee ownership; and absentee ownership is safeguarded by a special clause of the American constitution. There need be no apprehension that the present unreserved control of the industrial arts by businesslike laymen will be discontinued, just yet. While it is quite evident that the conduct of productive industry, especially in its larger and more difficult undertakings, calls progressively for a more profound and wider technical insight and a more single-minded technical discretion and control, yet the general staff of the industrial system continues to be made up of businesslike laymen.

The state of the industrial arts, as it runs on the lines of the mechanical industry, is a technology of physics and chemistry. That is to say, it is governed by the same logic as the scientific laboratories. The procedure, the principles, habits of thought, preconceptions, units of measurement and of valuation, are the same in both cases, so far as regards any furtherance of the work in hand. Other considerations may come into the case, other preconceptions, principles, units of valuation ; but these others can come into bearing only as factors of disturbance from outside the orderly procedure of the work in hand, and can only deflect, retard, and curtail the work in hand.

The mechanistic technology makes use of the same range of facts as the laboratories, handled in the same impersonal way and directed to the same manner of objective results. In both cases alike it is of the first importance to eliminate the “personal equation,” to let the work go forward and let the forces at work take effect quite objectively, without hindrance or deflection for any personal end, interest, or gain. It is the technician’s place in industry, as it is the scientist’s place in the laboratory, to serve as an intellectual embodiment of the forces at work, isolate the forces engaged from all extraneous disturbances, and let them take full effect along the lines of designed work. The technician is an active or creative factor in the case only in the sense that he is the keeper of the logic which governs the forces at work. And he can be said to make these forces work and to have created the results that emerge under his hands, only in the sense that he has taken due care to see that these impersonal forces work out according to the logic which his experiments and calculations have formulated out of the ascertained behavior of the brute facts.

These brute forces that so are brought to bear in creative industry are of an objective, impersonal, unconventional nature, of course. They are of the nature of opaque fact. Pecuniary gain is not one of these impersonal facts. Any consideration of pecuniary gain that may be injected into the technician’s working plans will come into the case as an intrusive and alien factor, whose sole effect is to deflect, retard, derange and curtail the work in hand. At the same time considerations of pecuniary gain are the only agency brought into the case by the business men, and the only ground on which they exercise a control of production. Their office is to take care of the pecuniary interests of the absentee owners. In the nature of things, by force of the rights of ownership, they can, at will, selectively obstruct, forbid, curtail, deflect, derange, retard; but they can not bear a creative hand in what is going forward, inasmuch as their knowledge, interest, insight, and reasoning concerning the work that is going forward are not drawn in terms of the forces which enter creatively into the case. Yet, for good and conclusive reasons the final control of all these matters vests in the businesslike laymen. They are reasons of absentee ownership, and they are good and conclusive because they are a matter of settled habit. The claims of absentee ownership are as irrelevant to the conduct of industry as a fourth dimension of space is to the calculations of the mechanical engineers ; but the claims of absentee ownership after all are paramount, and they are sound and conclusive according to established law and custom. The technology of physics and chemistry is not derived from established law and custom, and it goes on its way with as nearly complete a disregard of the spiritual truths of law and custom as the circumstances will permit. The realities with which the technicians are occupied are of another order of actuality, lying altogether within the three dimensions that contain the material universe, and running altogether on the logic of material fact. In effect it is the logic of inanimate facts. The realities of technology are such things as wind and weather, topography and water courses, soil, climatic regions, coastlines and harbors, contour lines and geological formations, fuel, ores and fluxes, temperatures and chemical values, energy, mass, tensile strength, velocities, inertia and impact.

Progressively imbued with these habits of thought and driven by these preconceptions, the technicians had from the outset been working along these lines of tangible, impersonal reality; and by the middle, or the third quarter, of the nineteenth century they were coming within sight of their technological frontiers as drawn by the available knowledge of useful things in that time. Their achievement up to that time was in substance a technology of mechanics, fairly well rounded out. Not that the resources of mechanics had been worked out, nor even that the domain of mechanical power and mechanical appliances had been fully explored. The technological potentialities of mechanics were not nearing exhaustion, but the technicians of that time—inventors, designers, engineers-were after all in a position to say that, in the large and in its elements, they knew then what manner of things they had to do with and what manner of things they could reasonably promise to do with them. They had at their command those elements of mechanical power, mechanical contrivance, and structural material that would work out in a rounded system of mechanical operations, complete in itself, a balanced and self-contained going concern of productive industry. The further work in sight, within the frontiers of their technological province, was a work of further extension, articulation, and perfection of mechanical contrivances and processes; substantially a work of continuation and elaboration.

Seen in the perspective of a later time this technological situation of the middle nineteenth century is notable for what it got along without. It has a provincial air. But seen in the light of its own time it was passably complete, except for further practicable extensions and refinements of mechanical detail. There had been worked out a practicable and effectually inclusive system of transportation by land and water, by use of mechanical structures and mechanical power, competent and capable of extension and enlarged capacity at will. So there was also a competent mechanical system of lighting, capable of further elaboration but complete in its elements, even to the nineteenth-century inventions of the friction match and the lamp-chimney,—so far complete, in effect, that the next move in that connection has been in the nature of “obsolescence by supersession.” The tool-builders of the early nineteenth century had pushed their work through to the construction of a finished series of machine-tools which still continue, with improvements and extensions in detail, to meet the needs of the mills and machinists. And, in great part as an effect of these machine-tools, standardisation of mechanical units, units of gauge, work, and materials, was beginning to dominate the life of industry and was giving rise to those principles of interchangeable parts and automatic process that lie at the root of quantity production. The industrial system as a working whole was falling into shape as a mechanical articulation of standard processes.

But taken as a whole and seen in the perspective of the twentieth century the mechanical industry of that time looks like a technological province. Industrial electricity and industrial chemistry had virtually no place in that scheme of things. There was no petroleum, virtually no industrial use of rubber, and virtually no use of cement. These things were not precisely unknown, but they were things which it was not then quite necessary to know anything about. The working scheme of things got along well enough without them. Refrigeration was still unknown, industrially ; the hermetically sealed tin had not become a part of daily life; and the internal-combustion engine had not been invented, not even the rudimentary Otto gas-engine. As an after-effect of Faraday’s experiments and speculations on “The viscosity of the magnetic field” in the second quarter of the century, the dynamo and the electrical industry came into the technologist’s world in the course of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Over the same interval of time, taking its departure from the experiments and speculations of Berthelot on the synthesis of organic compounds in the third quarter of the century, industrial chemistry has arisen and by insensible degrees has run its creative tentacles through the technological system from the ground up.^4a

It is true, chemical processes had been in daily use from the earliest times, in metallurgy, tanning, fermentation, and the like ; but it is a significant fact that the phrase, “industrial chemistry,” was not known and not needed until the other day. So also electricity was not unknown, and there is no call to overlook or minimise the industrial use of such appliances as the Morse telegraph; but a “live wire” is a conception that arose in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and “volts,” “amperes,” and “kilowatts” are units of measurement that were not needed until the other day. In the third quarter of the century the technical vocabulary was still complete without these neologisms, and the logic of industrial procedure was complete without the conceptions for which they speak. Since that time chemical and electrical engineers and appliances have been multiplying on the face of the land like the frogs of Exodus, until the only remaining certainty is that if there is any root or branch of industry that is free from them today they will invade it tomorrow.

It is of the essence of this mechanical plan of industry that the work to be done is done on a mechanical plan. The logic of it is the logic of inanimate forces and masses deliberately liberated according to design. Where-ever chemical and electrical science come into the scheme of work they fall into line as ways and means in the carrying out of a complex mechanical process. The activities and materials which the mechanical industry makes use of and the ways and means by which it makes use of them are of a brute nature, mechanical, inanimate, such that the time, place, rate and volume of their operation can be arranged at will.

Even where animate factors are employed, as they are increasingly employed in the processes of fermentation and the like, these animate materials, too, are handled on a mechanical plan. They are liberated and controlled in the mass, impersonally, according to calculated design, in terms of volume, “cultures,” media, concentrations, temperatures, time allowance, with the same freedom and the same nicety of computed effect as the reagents of inorganic chemistry. The whole callous procedure belongs to the mechanical order of things. It has none of the solicitous personal concern that goes, e. g., to make up the day’s work of a shepherd. The seasonal work of husbandry and the farmer’s dealings with his crops and livestock continues to have a quality of personality—the farmer lives with these things, even where mechanical appliances and standardised feeding, fertilisers and irrigation, have gone farthest in the way of bringing mixed farming into line with the impersonal drive of the machine process.

This mechanical system of work has the peculiar quality that it can be managed at will, that it is not subject to seasonal and fortuitous circumstances over which men have no control; “acts of God” do not intervene except by human neglect or ignorance. The system is complex, intricate and extensive ; daily growing more complex, intricate and extensive; but it is a creature of human information and initiative, and all its complex and interwoven motions have been formulated out of experience and run wholly within the lines of known objective fact. It is a creation out of known mechanical fact and the knowledge that has gone to its making and that continues to go to its maintenance and working is of the nature of data. There are no mysteries in the mechanical technique and no occult or magical agencies in the way of a trend, bent, reservation, or inscrutable eventuality. Such obscure factors as may come into the case are taken over and allowed for as known variables of hitherto unascertained magnitude; and the system moves on in terms of the calculated brute factors, the data, with such margin of allowance for error as experience has shown to be called for; for in this technology even the margin of ignorance that has to be allowed for and circumvented is carried as a datum to which a working value is assigned on grounds of expert approximation. The technology of physics and chemistry is altogether matter-of-fact, and its facts are of the nature of data, brute, refractory, impersonal and irresponsible. It is open and aboveboard, but it is also exacting and implacable.

The mechanical system of industry is manageable at will, in detail and at large, but only on the proviso (a) that all technical knowledge that is in use must be accessible, without restraint or reservation, to all the technicians concerned, and (b) that there must be no interference on other than technical grounds. Restraint or reservation, holding out information in the way of trade secrets, injects an incalculable element of error into all related lines of work. The industrial system is an edifice of interlocking processes of work, each of which is a reasoned method of procedure, and the reasoning on which each proceeds is based on the information available as to what is going on and what is intended in all the rest; information as to the methods of work, current and prospective, and the nature, rate and volume of output as well as the kind, quality and quantity of materials employed. For none of these interlocking processes of work is carried on, or can be carried on, independently of the rest. Any degree of isolation involves a degree of error in the specifications of the work, and any withholding of information consequently brings perplexity and derangement to all the rest.

This will hold true in a special degree for the great staple industries, but it is true also in a degree for all subsidiary lines of production. They are bound in a network of give and take of such a nature that the lines of interdependence are endless. The correlation and running adjustment in the work to be done is taken care of by calculation based on the available data as to what is being done in one line and another and what is in prospect, on information or inference as to the kind and quantity of what each and several of these lines of production are ready to give and what and how much they will take. In so far as these calculations governing the kind, rate and volume of work to be done are based on guess-work they are bound to run over or under the true figures and so to result in waste and scarcity and therefore in a more or less pronounced derangement all down the line.

Secrecy and mystification may be “good for trade,” but they are altogether bad for industry ; sabotage may be indispensable in business although it is invariably disastrous to production. A trade secret is a “business proposition” and may be profitable to its keeper, and the like is true for all secrecy of accounts ; at least such is believed to be the case. Unemployment of materials, equipment, and man-power, curtailment of output, may be a sound business proposition and may bring gain to the business; at least the belief is commonly acted on. But all these things are invariably wasteful in their industrial bearing, and invariably bring derangement and retardation in the related lines of industry, which will on occasion amount to disaster ; and the net loss to industry always exceeds the net gain to the business.

The mechanical industry in that simpler form in which it stood before the coming of industrial chemistry and electricity, was, even then, taking on this character of articulation and interplay of productive processes, so that even at that date the industrial system made up a loosely balanced going concern of production. And as fast and far as the mechanisation of industry gained, in scope, range, volume and territorial extension, the articulation of working processes grew continually closer and the balance of give and take within the system grew more exacting and more critical. Yet these matters had not then gone so far as to bring home to the thoughtful men of that time the critical importance of a due balance, proportion, and articulation among the interlocking processes of the industrial system.⁵

When the growth of industrial chemistry and electricity set in there also set in, by insensible degrees, a new era in the articulation of industrial processes. The contrast between what went before and what followed after is by no means sharp, but it is fairly wide; more particularly, it has grown wide as time has gone by. The difference between before and after is due in part to the continued growth of those technological factors that had made the situation of the earlier time, in part to the intrusion of new agencies which made for increased complexity of operations and a larger scale. It would scarcely be an overbold figure of speech to say that under the old dispensation of the middle nineteenth century the technological plan of things was drawn in two dimensions, whereas under the new technological dispensation, so far as chemical and electrical science have taken effect, the industrial system and its growth may be said to move in space of three dimensions.

The number and interplay of technological factors engaged in any major operation in industry today are related to the corresponding facts of the middle nineteenth century somewhat as the mathematical cube is related to the square ; and the increase and multiplication of these technological factors is going forward incontinently, at a constantly accelerated rate.

By the middle of the century the work of designing and supervising the processes of production was already beginning to pass into the hands of specially trained experts, engineers, technicians. It was beginning to exceed the best powers of intelligent laymen working on a footing of general information. The course of things since then, and the rate and scope of the change that has been going forward, is shown by the exuberant growth of the engineering professions, in numbers, competency, and diversity, as well as by their ubiquitous place in the workday conduct of industrial undertakings. In the twentieth century the technicians have become one of the standard factors in production; as much so as the country’s natural resources of timber, coal, oil, and ores. Indeed, these things are natural resources, instead of being features of the landscape, because the technicians know how to turn them to account. And the extent and variety of the country’s natural resources are constantly increasing, because and by so much as the technicians are continually learning to make use of a larger number and variety of these things. The question of natural resources is, after all, a question of technical insight.

In the beginning the technicians came into the case by progressive infiltration, as designers, consultants, overseers of special details that were too recondite to be taken care of by intelligent laymen on a footing of general information. And these technical details that required expert attention grew continually more urgent and more numerous; they coalesced into ever larger composite working units and fell into progressively closer, more numerous and more exacting articulations among themselves and with the sources of mechanical power and useful materials ; with the result that every successive move in this technological growth and complication made two technicians grow where one grew before ; and all the while the meshwork of technology has grown and tightened, and always a technician stands at every apex of growth. Until today, throughout the system of the mechanical industries, it has become a matter of course that the conduct as well as the designing of any industrial plant or process that is to make use of the advanced industrial arts cannot safely be entrusted to others than technically trained men. The safe and sane plan of common sense now dictates that industrial operations must be conducted by competent technicians. And this holds true in a special degree for the larger operations and the more formidable organisations of work and equipment, where many technological factors and a wide range of materials and processes are drawn together for teamwork in quantity production on an extensive scale. So it should also hold true in a superlative degree as regards the oversight and control of the industrial system at large as a going concern ; the balance, articulation, and mutual support among the several lines of production and distribution that go to make up the system.

However, the rule of the technicians does not go all the way. It began with taking over minor details and fractional outlines of design and operation, and it has hitherto progressed only so far as to cover now what may be called the major details of the industrial system. The planning and surveillance of productive industry at large, in those bearings that are of capital systematic importance, have not yet been taken over by technically trained men. All that is still in the hands of laymen working at cross purposes. Plainly, this capital work of correlation, apportionment, balance and continuity, control of the mutual give and take among the several lines and branches of production, should call for the most intelligent and most scrupulously dispassionate exercise of technical insight and deliberation. Technologically speaking, this is the apex of the industrial system. The work should logically devolve on a technical General Staff. But hitherto all this work of sovereign technical jurisdiction remains in the hands of laymen working at cross purposes, and it continues to be conducted on certain broad principles of ignorance, neglect and sabotage; all in deference to the paramount rights of absentee ownership. The sovereign jurisdiction in all this highly technical scheme of industry vests in the non-technical business men. Their dealings with the industrial system and all its works are governed not by the calculus of productive work but by the calculus of net gain in terms of price. In the nature of things, the aims, considerations and rulings injected into the run of work by these laymen on these grounds are irrelevant, incompetent, and impertinent, and not germane to the case of creative industry; being grounded in that alien fourth dimension of the economic situation that is called Business Expediency.

To put these generalities and abstractions in more concrete terms, so far as scant space will permit. The industrial system is a composite organisation of work which falls into three interlocking divisions or strata of industrial undertakings, as has already been shown in an earlier passage:—the Key Industries, Manufactures, and Farming. These three groups or classes of industrial undertakings differ from one another not so much in their technological character and relations as in the business considerations which govern them. Technically the two first named belong together as a high-wrought and wide-sweeping application of the mechanical industry, while the same scheme of mechanical processes and appliances laps over into the work of farming also.

As working parts in the system, the several industrial undertakings which make up its three divisions are all inextricably bound together in an endless web of give and take. They are, each and several, mutually continuations of one another. Co-ordination and mutual aid between these three divisions of the industrial system, at large and in detail, is the first requisite of production on this plan. At the same time it is something which can be duly taken care of only by eternal vigilance and unhampered teamwork on the part of a suitable corps of technically trained and experienced men. Whereas, in practice, by force of the rights of ownership, all these matters are habitually taken care of by afterthought and guesswork.

Technically speaking, there is, e. g., no break of continuity in the working-up of lumber, from the time when the lumberman takes it off the stump to the time when it comes out from under the hands of the house-carpenter in the shape of finished floors, doors and casings in place, or the time when the cabinet-maker has turned it out as furniture, or when the builder of sign-boards has worked it into the scenery along the highway and inscribed it with the legend, “Eventually, why not now?” Industrially, in all its ramifications, this wood-working is an unbroken sequence of special processes of work; each successive process of elaboration is standardised with a view to the shape in which its material comes in, to the power and appliances by which the work is to be done, and by the standard shapes in which the same material is to be passed on into the next succeeding process in the industrial chain. And at every point in the sequence it is of the essence of the case that the work should go forward in unbroken continuity, supplied at a known rate and volume of materials of standard kinds, gauges and grades. Uncertainty, interruption, or evasion at any point counts unavoidably as derangement and unemployment throughout the sequence of work. In practice, for reasons of business expediency, there is deliberate evasion, delay, and uncertainty at as many points in this sequence of work as there are subdivisions of ownership along the way; for alongside the chain of working processes there runs an equal chain of businesslike owners working at cross purposes with one another.

The like holds true, only in a more formidable way, for the steel industry. Technically it is of the essence of the case that the right ores and the suitable coke and fluxes should go, without hindrance, to all those steel-works that are fit for the work in hand and necessary to turn out such a rate and volume of output as will meet the working needs of the industries concerned, and that they should go to no others; due regard being had to the means of transportation and the points of delivery. Technologically speaking, the working-up of the steel supply into finished products begins with the selection of the ores and other raw materials and with the location and planning of the steel works, including due provision for the housing and livelihood of the man-power engaged. From that point on the work goes forward—or should go forward—in a calculated sequence of standardised processes and products, designed to run in unbroken continuity and to supply the ways and means of work through the further stages of elaboration, in standard units of kind, gauge, grade, and delivery, as assigned by competent technicians working in concert. So, e. g., the production of any given article of farm implements or machinery technically begins with the selection of ores, fluxes and processes suitable to make a steel of the special character required, it runs through a chain of processes by which the parts are fashioned and assembled, and it ends only when the transportation agencies have delivered the implement on the ground where it is to be used ; and even then the case continues in the way of sundries, repairs and replacements, until the life-history of the implement is concluded. All of which is contained in the technological premises and is capable of detailed and unambiguous specification in mechanical units of the kind familiar to the engineers, and none of which can go forward except in some sort of articulate correlation with all the rest. Ambiguity comes in only when business considerations enter, and ambiguity unavoidably comes in wherever business considerations enter.

In practice, the production of steel is a “business proposition.” It is controlled by an absentee management with an eye single to the net gain of absentee owners. Steel production is a “key industry”; that is to say, the business men who control it are able to withhold resources and limit the output of one of the prime requisites of other industries at will. It is the invariable practice of “safe and sane” management to limit the output to “what the traffic will bear,”—that is to say, to what will yield the largest net gain to the absentee owners. The business management of such a “key industry” have no responsibility and incur no blame for any derangement, waste or unemployment which this “safe and sane” business practice entails on the rest of the industrial system.⁶ It is only that the calculus of business runs in terms that are not commensurable with the calculus of the industrial process. The calculus of business is a calculus of money-value, which is not a mechanical or material fact ; whereas the calculus of industry is a calculus of mechanical, tangible, material values. From which it follows that any intrusion of business strategy into the conduct of industry will be sabotage.

The case is of the same complexion when turned the other way about. Farming, e. g., draws on the machine industries, and therefore eventually on the key industries in steel, coal, oil, transportation, etc., for its necessary equipment and workday supplies. But at the same time the output of grain, meat, and dairy products makes up the livelihood of the man-power that is consumed in these key industries and in subsidiary and accessory ramifications of the industrial system. These elements of the community’s livelihood run through a technically continuous process of working-up and distribution, by use of mills, packing houses, railways, retailers, and the like; and technically it is of the essence of the case that this process of production, working-up, and distribution should go forward in unbroken continuity on a concerted schedule of work and output, with no avoidable shortage, waste, delay, or evasion along the way. In practice the transportation, milling, packing, distribution, and retailing, is controlled by absentee owners with an eye single to their own net gain in terms of price, by a strategy of evasion, secrecy, shortage, waste, and delay.

This sketch of the technological system and its working is evidently overdrawn as well as incomplete. It describes the possibilities of the case rather than the actual run of things. There are good and sufficient reasons why the industries which embody this technology of physics and chemistry do not in practical fact reach this pitch of productive work, as well as why the balance and articulation of industrial processes are not nearly so complete, comprehensive and exacting as this description would imply. The largest and most generally applicable of these reasons for under-efficiency is the all-pervading sabotage that is brought into the work by the present businesslike control of production and distribution; and the nature and consequences of this businesslike management will merit a more detailed analysis and exposition. But there are also other infirmities in the situation, partly intrinsic to the technology and its personnel, partly due to use and wont, law and custom, knowledge and belief prevalent in the community.

The infirmities of the technology, as such, are in the main the infirmities of growth and consequent obsoles-scence. The technological scheme is engaged in an unremitting growth, which proceeds by cumulative change in detail, and the apices of growth are numerous and more or less isolated, even if account be taken only of the more significant and substantial changes that are going forward. What may be called the cross-references or inosculations of the technological growth come into bearing only by further contrivance which proceeds on further familiarity with the new elements of knowledge, such as comes only on the ground of something like common notoriety.⁷ It will commonly take some time for any new method or process to find its way into the various uses which it will eventually serve, and to be tested out in these uses; and there is commonly some practical doubt and hesitation, to be tested out in detail, as to the rate and extent in which an improved or alternative process will eventually supersede earlier methods of doing the work.⁸ These things take time and carry a margin of uncertainty, hesitation, experiment, and obsolescence, such as to leave the system as a whole in a chronically unfinished and incompletely balanced state, due to continued growth. In a sense, the technological system is never fully abreast of itself.

The technological system is an organisation of intelligence, a structure of intangibles and imponderables, in the nature of habits of thought. It resides in the habits of thought of the community and comes to a head in the habits of thought of the technicians. This technology of physics and chemistry that goes to make the mechanical system of industry is an organisation of habits of thought which run on the ground of mechanistic logic, the logic of impersonal activities which run wholly within the confines of the three dimensions of space. It makes no use of conventional, sentimental, religious, or magical truths. But the habits of thought of the community run, in the main, on conventional, sentimental, religious, and magical lines, and are governed by the logic native to that order of realities.

The received system of institutions which governs human thought and conduct among the civilised peoples is a fabric of conventional, sentimental, religious, and magical habits of thought. These institutions are of a spiritual nature ; that is to say, the logic by which they are actuated runs wholly outside the confines of the three dimensions of space. As seen from the standpoint of physics and chemistry, they are of a supernatural or prae-ternatural complexion. The mechanistic logic of physics and chemistry comes into this institutional order of things as an interloper, a non-conformist with an alien strain. The technology of physics and chemistry, therefore, works under something of a handicap, in an institutional environment imbued with a logical bias that is alien to its bent and inhospitable to its free growth.

Like other men, the technicians are citizens of the world in which they live and creatures of the institutional environment out of which they spring. Such is the declaration of the material sciences, and such is the deliverance of the mechanistic logic on that head. Like other men, the technicians and the technically trained workmen come through their years of growth and use and wont with more or less of the same logical bias that pervades the community at large,—a bias of the animistic order that runs on conventional proprieties, moralities, religious and magical symbols and superstitions. Under these circumstances, the measure in which these men who carry on the mechanical technology achieve a mastery of its mechanistic logic is always a matter of more or less. Their mentality is more or less of an addiction to matter-of-fact habits of thought governed, with more or less mitigation, by the mechanistic logic, and always carrying more or less extensive adhesions of that tissue of superstitions that goes to build up the Christian gentleman and the patriotic citizen. It is only that in the technicians and technically trained workmen the miraculous convictions of religion and the magical “forced movements” of nationalism have suffered a degree of sterilisation. It is a question of more or less, and it is the constant care of the pillars of society to see that the degree of sterilisation suffered by these antiquities of the human spirit shall in no instance exceed a salutary modicum.

In the civilised scheme of education and training for the young, solicitude converges on those elements of knowledge and belief that run outside the confines of the three dimensions of space. The foundations of knowledge and belief are laid in the miracles of the faith and the magic of national allegiance. It is a matter of course to all right-minded citizens of all the Christian nations that a child must first learn to say his prayers and salute the flag.⁹ In the institutional scheme of the civilised nations the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God ; whereas in the technology of physics and chemistry the beginning of wisdom is to forget Him. And some forget Him more, others less, but none altogether. Latterly, as an aftermath of the atrocities of war, an increased stress has been laid on bending the young idea to religious devotion and patriotic fervor, and thereby, in effect, bending the incoming generation away from the bias of the mechanistic logic ; which will count for what it may be worth in defeat of the technological spirit.¹⁰

At the same time the commercial bent of the community at large and of its educational system works to the same general effect. The old generation of engineers have been pretty well commercialised by lifelong attendance on business expediency in the service of business concerns whose sole standard of efficiency is net gain in terms of price. By inveterate habit these elders go to their day’s work in a spirit of salesmanship ; and their outlook on the engineer’s work is an outlook on what it will bring, quite as much as on what it will do. In all this the elder engineers are quite at one with the common sense of the community at large as well as with the settled convictions of the substantial citizens who pursue the net gain and stand as pillars of society. Under the aegis of these pillars of society and borne up by the commercialised common sense of the underlying population, those who have the care of schooling the country’s young men are diverting more and more of the country’s educational resources to the service of salesmanship, training for a business career. By so much as this endeavor to divert the schools to the service of salesmanship has the designed effect it acts to draw off talent and training from the service of workmanship and to curtail the reserve of human material on which the technological advance will be able to draw. At the same time its acts in its degree pervasively to lessen the single-mindedness of that contingent of young men who go into the work of technology.

1: The limits and ramifications of this industrial system run in a peculiar fashion, on peculiar lines of coincidence. Loosely and for the time being, but with such a degree of consistency as to make it worth noting, this state of industry has made itself at home only among those peoples that get their livelihood from the mixed farming of the temperate latitudes,—from that manner of husbandry which traces back to neolithic Europe and which still makes use of substantially the same equipment of crop-plants and domestic animals that came into use at that time. It may all be a matter of fortuitous coincidence. It is not easy to find an organic connection or correlation between the mechanical technology and this special type of mixed farming; and yet it is also not easy to avoid the tacit assumption that the two are in some way intimately bound up together ; and certain opaque facts of recent experience argue that way.

E. g., the Great War was carried on as a contest of mechanical appliances, a competitive enterprise in the technology of mechanics and chemistry, backed by man-power whose livelihood was drawn from this type of mixed farming. This great adventure involved and made use of substantially all those peoples whose industry is regulated by the mechanical technology and whose subsistence is drawn from this type of husbandry, and virtually no others; and in the end the decision was reached on these two counts; technological mastery, and the food-supply of the temperate latitudes. Throughout the conflict, underlying all the pursuit of funds and munitions and conditioning it, ran the desperate need of a standard subsistence—grain, meat, milk, animal fats, wool, leather—all standardised on the basis of that mixed farming that has come down from neolithic times. And as if to complete the experiment and bring the relative value of these two factors in the fight to a conclusive test, there has been the continued run of hostilities that have engaged European (and American) statecraft since the return of peace.

The most notable of these is the case of Russia. The obstinate and hitherto inconclusive endeavour of the Associated Powers to break Soviet Russia has been, in the main, a contest between finance, commerce and mechanical industry on the one side and mixed farming on the other side. It has been a conflict of desperation between the most advanced among the industrial and commercial nations on the one side and the most nearly neolithic population of peasant farmers on the other, in which the Allied and Associated Powers have endeavored to bring the peasant farmers to terms by shutting them off from the use of the industrial and commercial system of Christendom and turning the resources of that system against them. Hitherto the peasant farmers have, on the whole, held their ground against the forces brought to bear by the financiers and the captains of industry, and the likelihood of their being brought to reason seems, on the whole, increasingly remote. At the same time the peasant farmers of Russia appear all the while to be shaping the course of things more and more to their own notion at home. European civilisation appears not yet to have passed the stage at which mixed farming is the prime conditioning factor in its material fortunes.

2: “To these from birth is belief forbidden; from these till death is relief afar,

They are concerned with matters hidden; under the earth-line their altars are.

They do not teach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose;

They do not preach that His Pity allows them to leave their work whenever they choose.”

RUDYARD KIPLING, “The Sons of Martha.”

3: Cf. J. W. Roe, English and American Tool Builders, (Yale University Press, 1916.)

4: Beginning with the civil-war period the center of the American stage is occupied by a swiftly increasing company of financial magnates and manipulators, e.g., “Commodore” Vanderbilt, Jay Cooke, “Jim” Fiske, Oakes Ames, Jay Gould, and presently John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J. J. Hill.—Cf. Burton J. Hendrick, The Age of Big Business; Isaac Lippincott, Economic Development of the United States.

4a: Cf., e. g., Slosson, Creative Chemistry.

5: In 1832 Charles Babbage spoke as of a matter of course in restating Adam Smith’s observation, that “Perhaps the most important principle on which the economy of a manufacture depends, is the division of labor amongst the persons who perform the work.” (On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, chapter xviii. “On the Division of Labor.”) Bab-bage’s observations on the British industrial system were made at a time when British manufactures were still managed, in the main, by captains of industry of the traditional type, on a plan of unguarded competitive production for an open market; the scale of work and equipment was still relatively slight, and specialisation had not gone far; standardisation of processes, appliances, and output was still in its beginnings. (See Babbage, ch. x, “Of the Identity of Work when it is of the Same Kind,” etc.) The machine process and quantity production had not at that time taken effect as pace-maker and prime mover in industry in so obvious a fashion as to force this new state of things on his attention.

It is even more significant that at a still later date, in the fifties and sixties, from observation of the same industrial system, Karl Marx set up a doctrine which makes “Labor Power” the sole creative factor as well as the common measure in all productive work. Neither of these men is unduly bound by the traditions of economic science, and yet neither one of them was provoked by the run of the facts as he saw them to conceive the industrial system at large as a going concern. They were still content to speak of industry as an affair of detachable factors and independent segments of work going on in severalty.

6: The present (1919-1923) situation shows what these entailed consequences are like.—Cf., e. g., Waste in Industry, by the Committee of the Federated American Engineering Societies, (New York, 1921, chapters i, ii, xi, xii; also Report on the Steel Strike of 191Q, by the Commission of the Interchurch World Movement; and Public Opinion and the Steel Strike, by The Same. (New York, 1921.)

7: So, e. g., the use of reënforced concrete came out of a technological symphysis involving several elementary facts of workday knowledge and practice, each of which had been a matter of common notoriety since a date older than the birth of the men at whose hands the new move was made.

8: E. g., the partial and gradual supersession of the Bessemer Converter by the Open Hearth and the recourse to the “basic” process in steel making, with the consequent shifting to a different range of iron ores and a partial relocation of the industrial plants.

9: In point of institutional value these things are of the first consequence, but when brought within the three dimensions of space and submitted to the logic of physics and chemistry the potent sacraments of Holy Church are no different from the futile incantations of the Black Art, and the. Star-spangled Banner (Long may it wave!) foots up as a wasteful exposure of a woollen fabric to the elements.

10: All the while it is not to be overlooked that the case of America is bound up with the case of Europe, in respect of its technological science and man-power. Technologically, America is after all a province or outlier of the European general body; so that America faces a virtually assured decline in this respect, -—presumably a fatal decline. The technical man-power lost in the War is not being replaced; the conditions imposed by the businesslike Peace do not permit it; particularly not in those countries of continental Europe on which the continued growth and maintenance of technical science have come to depend.