The Locomotive - Lighthouse Survival Blog

1901.
J
THE LOCOMOTIVE. -153
degree of engineering instinct and technical skill, yet it occurred in an antiquity so
remote that we shall never be able to do honor to the first great hydraulic engineer, the
inventor of the water-wheel. With the introduction of water power began, although
at first in a very small way, the use of machinery as a substitute for manual skill. As
long as the workman furnished all of the power demanded by his handicraft, the ma-
chinery he employed was limited, often to his own fingers and hands, supplemented by
a few tools of the simplest kind.
Curiously, the word "manufacturing" literally means " making by hand," which
is just what it does not mean in its modern acceptation, and in this modern sense manufacturing,—
" making things by machinery," — practically began with the introduc-
tion of water power, by which machinery could be run. Instead of pounding the corn
or turning the millstone, men occupied themselves with the far more agreeable task of
seeing that the mill was supplied with material; instead of making the wheels go
round, they watched them go, and saw that they went properly. This was the first
great step towards emancipation from the slavery of that unintelligent toil in which
man differs from the beasts of the field only by being inferior to them.
Up to the beginning of the nineteenth century no other sources of power than these
three,— muscle, air in motion, and water.— were extensively employed. The only
opportunity for great expansion in the world's output of work was in the greater use of
water and wind. But while the total energy embodied in these two elements was enor-
mous, its utilization was subject to such serious limitations as to time, place, rate of
supply, and others, that power development was slow, coming, when it came at all, as a
result, and not as a cause, of the steady enlargement of human enterprise. Wind
power was used only as a last, resort where nothing else was available. Water power
could be used only where it existed, and for this reason it sometimes directed the
course of exploration and colonization ; but agricultural resources and possibilities
were always considered as vastly more important. For these reasons those arts and
industries dependent upon the use of machinery or upon rapidity or cheapness of trans-
portation made comparatively little progress during several centuries preceding the
nineteenth, being, in the nature and quality of their products, not very different from
what they were at the beginning of the sixteenth, and, indeed, a thousand years had
brought no remarkable extension in their operations nor innovation in their methods.
The g'reat revolution in industrial processes and operations which constitutes the
glory of the nineteenth century began with the recognition of the value of heat energy
and the possibility of transforming it into useful forms of power. More than a thou-
sand years ago this transformation was attempted, with little real success, however, and
with less understanding of the nature and meaning of the operation. It was only when
this was revealed by the genius of Watt and Rumford that the new era actually set in.
They, first of all, distinctly comprehended the interrelation of heat and mechanical
energy,— their equivalence and capacity for transformation. They showed that any
source of heat was a source of power, and the combustion of fuel began at once tq super-
sede or supplement the use of muscle, water, or wind in the work of the world. .
The new power possessed so many advantages over the old, especially in availabil-
ity and constancy, that its development was rapid, even in the beginning. The limita-
tions to the current supply of combustible material in the form of wood would soon
have checked this development, but, happily, an enormous, apparently inexhaustible
stock of fuel in the convenient form of coal was at hand, and with continued improvement
in the construction and efficiency of the engine by means of which the transfor-
mation of heat into power is accomplished, the combustion of fuel and the transmuta-