One Thing Leads to Another |
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From Marx, Karl. Das
Kapital. As reproduced in Readings in Modern European
History, ed. James Harvey Robinson and Charles
Beard, vol. 2 (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1909), 56-58. |
German
economist and philosopher Karl Marx (1818-1883) was
born in Trier to a Jewish family and studied law,
history, and philosophy at universities in Bonn,
Berlin, and Jena. Marx was particularly intrigued
with the contrasting philosophies of Hegel and
Feuerbach. From
1848 onward, Marx resided in England. His
massive Das Kapital was based on his
observations of economic life in industrializing
England during his time there. In this excerpt, Marx
notes the cumulative effect of industrial
innovation. |
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A radical change in the mode
of production in one sphere of industry involves a similar
change in other spheres. This happens at first in such
branches of industry as are connected together by being
distinct steps in the manufacture of a single article, cloth
for instance, and yet are separated by the division of labor
in such a way that at each step an independent commodity is
produced. Thus spinning by machinery made weaving by
machinery a necessity, and both together made imperative the
mechanical and chemical revolution that took place in
bleaching, printing, and dyeing. So too, on the other hand,
the revolution in cotton spinning called forth the invention
of the gin for separating the seeds from the cotton fiber;
it was only by means of this invention that the production
of cotton became possible on the enormous scale at present
required.
But more especially, the revolution in modes of
production of industry and agriculture made necessary a
revolution in the means of communication and transportation.
These, in the form in which they had been handed down from
the earlier period, became unbearable trammels on modern
industry, with its feverish haste of production, its
enormous extent, its constant flinging of capital and labor
from one sphere of production into another, and its newly
established connections with the markets of the whole world.
Hence, apart from the radical changes introduced in the
construction of sailing vessels, the means of communication
and transportation became gradually adapted to the modes of
production of mechanical industry, by the creation of a
system of river steamers, railways, ocean steamers, and
telegraphs. But the huge masses of iron that had now to be
forged, to be welded, to be cut, to be bored, and to be
shaped, demanded, on their part, monster machines, for the
construction of which the methods of the manufacturing
period were utterly inadequate.
Modern industry had therefore itself to take in hand the
machine, its characteristic instrument of production, and to
construct machines by machines. It was not till it did this,
that it built up for itself a fitting technical foundation
and stood on its own feet. Machinery, simultaneously with
the increasing use of it, in the first decades of this
century, appropriated by degrees the fabrication of machines
proper. But it was only during the decade preceding 1866
that the construction of railways and ocean steamers on a
stupendous scale called into existence the cyclopean
machines now employed in the construction of "prime movers,"
or motors.
The most essential condition for the production of
machines by machines was a prime mover capable of exerting
any amount of force, and yet under perfect control. This
condition was already supplied by the steam engine, but at
the same time it was necessary to produce the geometrically
accurate straight lines, planes, circles, cylinders, cones,
and spheres, required in the detail parts of the machines.
This problem Henry Maudsley solved in the first decade of
this century by the invention of the slide rest, a tool that
was soon made automatic, and in a modified form was applied
to other constructive machines besides the lathe, for which
it was originally intended. This mechanical appliance
replaces not some particular tool but the hand itself, which
must, in order to produce a given form, hold and guide the
cutting tool along the iron or other material operated upon.
Thus it became possible to produce the individual parts of
machinery with a degree of ease, accuracy, and speed that no
accumulated experience of the hand of the most skilled
workman could give.
Thus when we fix our attention on the machinery employed
in the construction of machines, we find the manual
implements reappearing, but on a grand scale. For instance,
the cutting part of the boring machine is an immense drill
driven by a steam engine; without this machine, the
cylinders of large steam engines and of hydraulic presses
could not be made. The mechanical lathe is only a gigantic
reproduction of the ordinary foot lathe; the planing
machine, an iron carpenter, that works on iron with the same
tools that the human carpenter employs on wood; the
instrument that, on the London wharves, cuts the veneers, a
gigantic razor; the tool of the shearing machine, which
shears iron as easily as a tailor's scissors cut cloth, is a
monster pair of scissors; and the steam hammer works with an
ordinary hammer head, but of such a weight that not even the
god Thor himself could wield it. These steam hammers are an
invention of Nasmyth, and there is one that weighs over six
tons and strikes with a vertical fall of seven feet, on an
anvil weighing thirty-six tons. It is mere child's play for
it to crush a block of granite into powder, yet it is no
less capable of driving, with a succession of light taps, a
nail into a piece of soft wood. |
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