The Power of Machinery

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Nov 30, 1915

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 42, No. 47.

The Power of Machinery

SPEAKING of machinery, Carlyle has said that “without tools man is nothing; with tools, he is everything.” In the manufacture of pins, for example, to make twelve packages of one pound each by hand takes 140 hours, while a machine does the same amount of work in one hour and a half. To make a hundred pairs of shoes of a certain grade by hand takes 1,800 hours; by machine, 200 hours; while the cost of the machine-made shoes is one fifth that of the hand-made. When gingham cloth was made by hand, to make 800 yards took 5,800 hours. It now takes seventy-two hours by machine. A good man with a scythe could formerly reap one acre a day. A good reaper and binder can do it in twenty minutes.