THE POWER OF THE TRAINED HAND.
The Legend of Adam and the Stick with which he subdued the Animals. --
The Stick is the Symbol of Power, and only the Hand can wield it. --
The Hand imprisons Steam and Electricity, and keeps them at hard
Labor. -- The Destitution of England Two Hundred Years ago: a Pen
Picture. -- The Transformation wrought by the Hand: a Pen Picture. --
It is due, not to Men who make Laws, but to Men who make Things. --
The Scientist and the Inventor are the World’s Benefactors. -- A
Parallel between the Right Honorable William E. Gladstone and Sir
Henry Bessemer. -- Mr. Gladstone a Man of Ideas, Mr. Bessemer a Man of
Deeds. -- The Value of the latter’s Inventions. -- Mr. Gladstone
represents the Old Education, Mr. Bessemer the New.
It has been remarked that man is the wisest of animals because he has
hands. It is equally true that he is the most powerful of animals
because he has hands. It is with the hand that man has subdued all the
animals. There is a legend to the effect that on the day when Adam
revolted against his Maker, the animals, in their turn, revolted against
him, and ceased to obey him. “Adam called on the Lord for help, and the
Lord commanded him to take a branch from the nearest tree and make of it
a weapon, and strike with it the first animal that should refuse to obey
him. Adam took the branch, the leaves fell from it of their own accord,
and he found himself furnished with a stick proportioned to his height.
When the animals saw this weapon in the hands of the man they were
seized with an instinctive fear mingled with wonder, and they did not
dare to attack him. A lion alone, bolder than the rest, leaped upon him
to devour him, but Adam, who stood upon his guard, swift as lightning
whirled his stick and felled him to the earth with a single blow! At
this sight the terror of the other animals was so great that they
approached him trembling, and in token of their submission licked the
stick that he held in his hand.”[25]
[25] “The Story of the Stick,” p. 2. Translated and Adapted from the
French of Antony Réal [Fernand Michel]. New York: J. W. Bouton, 1875.
Throughout all the early ages the stick was both the symbol and the
instrument of power; and it is only the hand that can grasp and wield
the stick. The early kings reigned by virtue of the strong arm and the
supple hand. They claimed to be descended from Hercules, and their
emblem of power was a knotty stick. Nor does empire depend less upon the
hand now than it did in the morning of time.
The hand no longer grasps the knotty stick; it no longer menaces
mankind. But it wields the mechanical powers. It imprisons steam and
electricity, and keeps them at hard labor. It makes ploughs, planters,
harvesters, sewing-machines, locomotives, and steamships. It digs
canals, opens mines, builds bridges, makes roads, erects mills and
factories, constructs harbors and docks, reclaims waste lands, and
covers the globe with tracks of steel over which the commerce of the
world is borne.
Two hundred years ago England was destitute of most of these things. It
had then no good dirt roads even, no good bridges, no canals, no public
works worth mentioning, and scarcely any manufactories of importance.
The post-bags were carried on horseback once a week. The highways were
besieged by robbers. One-fifth of the community were paupers. Mechanics
worked for from sixpence to a shilling a day. The chief food of the poor
was rye, barley, or oats. The people were ignorant and brutal--masters
beat their servants, and husbands beat their wives. Teachers used the
lash as the principal means of imparting knowledge. The mob rejoiced in
fights of all kinds, and shouted with glee when an eye was torn out or a
finger chopped off in these savage encounters. Executions were favorite
public amusements. The prisons were full, and proved to be fruitful
nurseries of crime.
From little better than a wilderness, and almost a state of savagery,
England has been transformed into a fruitful field, and its people
raised in the scale of civilization. Its public works are the admiration
of the world; its coffers are full of gold; its strong boxes are piled
high with evidences of the indebtedness of other nations; its ships
plough the billows of every sea, and bear the commerce of every land;
and its manufactories, of vast extent, are monuments of inventive
genius, industry, perseverance, and skill, more imposing far than the
pyramids of Egypt or the temples of Greece and Rome.
To whom do the people of England and of the world owe this national
progress, this progress in the useful arts on a scale so colossal as, by
comparison, to dwarf the achievements of all the earlier epochs of
history? Not to statesmen or legislators. They neither dig canals, open
mines, build railways, lay ocean cables, nor erect factories. The pen in
their hands may be mightier than the sword; but it is no match for the
plough and the reaper, the electric battery and imprisoned steam.
Legislators make laws but mechanics make things. On this subject, after
an exhaustive investigation, Buckle says, “Seeing, therefore, that the
efforts of government in favor of civilization are, when most
successful, altogether negative, and seeing, too, that when these
efforts are more than negative they become injurious, it clearly follows
that all speculations must be erroneous which ascribe the progress of
Europe to the wisdom of its rulers. This is an inference which rests not
only on the arguments already adduced, but on facts which might be
multiplied from every page of history.... We have seen that their laws
in favor of industry have injured industry, that their laws in favor of
religion have increased hypocrisy, and that their laws to secure truth
have encouraged perjury.... But it is a mere matter of history that our
legislators, even to the last moment, were so terrified by the idea of
innovation that they refused every reform until the voice of the people
rose high enough to awe them into submission, and forced them to grant
what, without much pressure, they would by no means have conceded.”[26]
[26] “History of Civilization in England,” Vol. I., pp. 204, 205, 361.
By Henry Thomas Buckle. New York: D. Appleton & Co.
It is, then, clearly not to the men who make laws that we are indebted
for progress in civilization, but to the men who make things. The
scientist who discovers a new principle in physics is a public
benefactor. The inventor who devises a new machine helps forward the
cause of progress. Whitney’s cotton-gin trebled the value of the
cotton-fields of the South. The mechanic who constructs a machine that
will make ten or a hundred things in the time before required to make
one thing is in the front rank of the civilizers of the human race.[27]
[27] “Your wealth, your amusement, your pride, would all be alike
impossible, but for those whom you scorn or forget.... The sailor
wrestling with the sea’s rage; the quiet student poring over his book
or his vial; the common worker, without praise, and nearly without
bread, fulfilling his task as your horses drag your carts, hopeless,
and spurned of all: these are the men by whom England lives.”--“Sesame
and Lilies,” p. 68. By John Ruskin, LL.D. New York: John Wiley & Sons,
1884.
Inventors, not statesmen, rule the world through their machines, which
augment the powers of man and sharpen his senses. Steam has made all
civilized countries prosperous and great by vastly increasing man’s
powers--by making him hundred-handed.[28]
[28] “The causes which most disturbed or accelerated the normal
progress of society in antiquity were the appearance of great men; in
modern times they have been the appearance of great
inventions.”--“History of European Morals,” Vol. I., p. 126. By
William Edward Hartpole Lecky, M.A. New York: D. Appleton & Co.
In 1809 there was born to a distinguished baronet of Liverpool, England,
a son. The boy was educated at Eton and Christ Church College, Oxford,
graduating in 1831. In 1832 the young man entered parliament. In 1834 he
took office under Sir Robert Peel. The name of the young man who
commenced life under such auspicious circumstances was William Ewart
Gladstone. For nearly half a century Mr. Gladstone was a prominent
figure in English politics and administration. During that long period
of time he was in the eye of the world, so to speak. He moulded the laws
of an empire, repealed old statutes and made new statutes, largely
influenced both the domestic and the foreign policy of a great nation,
and exerted a considerable degree of control over the international
affairs of the continent of Europe.
In 1813, four years after the birth of Mr. Gladstone, at Charlton, in
Hertfordshire, England, Henry Bessemer was born. His father, Anthony
Bessemer, had fled to England in 1792, a refugee from France. Henry
Bessemer’s early training consisted of the rudiments of an ordinary
education received in the parish school of the neighboring town of
Hitchin. His father was a skilled mechanic and inventor, and Henry
inherited the inventive faculty. He studied and practised the art of
wood-turnery, producing, before arriving at the age of manhood, the most
difficult patterns known to the art.
At the age of eighteen, in the year 1831--the year in which Mr.
Gladstone completed his education--young Bessemer appeared in London, an
obscure, unknown stranger. He, however, secured employment as a modeller
and designer. His attention was soon directed to the imperfections of
government stamps, in which there had been no improvement since the time
of Queen Anne. He was informed by Sir Charles Persley, of the
Stamp-office, that the frauds in stamps probably aggregated one hundred
thousand pounds per annum. In the evenings of a few months he invented
and made an improved stamp which obviated the objections to the one then
in use. The invention was at once adopted by the Stamp-office, and in
lieu of a stipulated sum in payment therefor, young Bessemer was asked
“whether he would be satisfied with the position of superintendent of
stamps, with five hundred or six hundred pounds per annum?” The
suggested appointment he agreed to accept. Meantime, before the
contemplated change occurred in the Stamp-office, the young inventor
devised a further improvement in the new stamp, which not only made it
much more perfect, but rendered it unnecessary for the government to
employ a superintendent of stamps. In perfect good faith young Bessemer
exhibited to the chief of the Stamp-office his new stamp, which was so
palpably an improvement on the other that it was at once preferred and
promptly adopted. What is more, the government not only declined to
appoint the inventor to a place, but declined to give him a penny for
his invention. This was in 1834, the year in which Mr. Gladstone began
his long career as a representative of the British Crown. As young Mr.
Gladstone entered the Treasury, its “junior lord,” young Mr. Bessemer
retired from it an unsuccessful suitor for the just reward of genius and
toil. He says, “Thus sad and dispirited, and with a burning sense of
injustice overpowering all other feelings, I went my way from the
Stamp-office, too proud to ask as a favor that which was indubitably my
right.”[29]
[29] “The Creators of the Age of Steel,” p. 20. By W. T. Jeans. New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1884.
From this point, both of time and event, there is a very wide divergence
in the lives of these great men. The one is a man of ideas, the other a
man of deeds. Mr. Gladstone thinks, talks, makes treaties and laws. He
is constantly in the public eye, and his name ever on the public tongue.
He is regarded as a great financier; he is certainly a great orator. He
sways the multitude with his eloquence. He takes distinguished part in
the wordy contests which occur every now and then in Parliament. These
debates are much talked of. At the conclusion of one of them there is a
vote of want of confidence, and Mr. Gladstone goes out of office and Mr.
Disraeli comes in. At the conclusion of another of them there is a vote
of want of confidence, and Mr. Disraeli goes out of office and Mr.
Gladstone comes in. But whether Mr. Gladstone goes out and Mr. Disraeli
comes in, or Mr. Disraeli goes out and Mr. Gladstone comes in, makes
very little difference with the trade and commerce of the kingdom. The
railway traffic continues in the one event or the other; the steamers
continue to cross and recross the ocean; the “post” comes and goes; the
electric current continues to act as messenger-boy; the telephone brings
us face to face with our business correspondent or friend. There is,
indeed, no reason why a vote of want of confidence in Mr. Gladstone or
Mr. Disraeli should imply a want of confidence in steam or electricity,
because neither Mr. Gladstone nor Mr. Disraeli ever had anything to do
with the application of these great forces to the uses of man. They were
entirely absorbed, the one in promoting the advancement of Liberalism,
and the other in promoting the advancement of Toryism. And it is a
curious fact, as showing the mutability of political opinion, that Mr.
Disraeli entered public life as a Liberal, and subsequently became a
great Tory leader; and Mr. Gladstone entered public life as a Tory, and
subsequently became a great Liberal leader.
For twenty-two years after he retired empty-handed from the government
Stamp-office Mr. Bessemer continued his career as an inventor and
manufacturer, without, however, attracting any great share of public
attention. But in 1856 he announced that he had made a discovery of vast
importance in the process of steel making.[30] For a hundred years
previously the Huntsman process had held the field. It yielded
excellent steel but was very expensive. Mr. Bessemer announced that he
could produce splendid cast-steel at about the cost of making iron! The
announcement was received with much incredulity; but the “Bessemer
converter” was exhibited, the new process shown, and the result seemed
to confirm the verity of the claim of the inventor. Practical
difficulties, however, postponed its complete success till 1860, when
the new process supplanted all others.
[30] “The first patent of Sir H. Bessemer in which air is mentioned as
the oxidizing agent is dated October 17, 1855, and other three months
were spent in experimenting before the idea of introducing the air
from the bottom of a large converter struck him. The patent embodying
the latter idea is dated February 11, 1856.”--“The Creators of the Age
of Steel,” note to p. 38. By W. T. Jeans. New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1884.
Mr. Bessemer now stood at the head of the inventors of the world, and
Mr. Gladstone, as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Palmerston, had
come to be regarded as one of the most skilful governmental financiers
in Europe, which meant that he was an adept in devising schemes of
taxation calculated to yield the most revenue with the least popular
discontent. When it is considered that it is necessary for the English
Minister of Finance to draw from the British people more than a million
dollars every morning of the year, including Sundays, before either the
English lord or the English peasant can indulge in a free breakfast, the
extreme delicacy of the duties devolving upon him will be understood and
appreciated. If he proposes the repeal of the soap tax in order to
extinguish the slave-trade, he must impose an additional penny in the
pound on malt liquors in order to put an end to the vice of drunkenness.
He is constantly between Scylla and Charybdis--in keeping off the one
he is in danger of being swallowed up in the other. And if he can, at
the end of the fiscal year, find a million dollars to apply to the
liquidation of the public debt, he is extremely fortunate. From 1836,
about the time Mr. Gladstone began his public career, down to 1877, the
several chancellors of the English Exchequer, including Mr. Gladstone,
contrived to save, in the aggregate, about twelve million pounds
sterling for this purpose.
Let us recur a moment to the subject of the invention of Mr. Bessemer.
It went into operation in 1860. The temptation to reproduce Mr.
Bessemer’s own description of his process, which revolutionized the
manufacture of steel, is irresistible. It is as follows:
“The converting vessel is mounted on an axis at or near its centre of
gravity. It is constructed of boilerplates, and is lined either with
fire-brick, road-drift, or gannister, which resists the heat better than
any other material yet tried, and has also the advantage of cheapness.
The vessel, having been heated, is brought into the requisite position
to receive its charge of melted metal, without either of the tuyeres (or
air-holes) being below the surface. No action can therefore take place
until the vessel is turned up (so that the blast can enter through the
tuyeres). The process is thus in an instant brought into full activity,
and small though powerful jets of air spring upward through the fluid
mass. The air, expanding in volume, divides itself into globules, or
bursts violently upward, carrying with it some hundredweight of fluid
metal, which again falls into the boiling mass below. Every part of the
apparatus trembles under the violent agitation thus produced; a roaring
flame rushes from the mouth of the vessel, and as the process advances
it changes its violet color to orange, and finally to a voluminous pure
white flame. The sparks, which at first were large, like those of
ordinary foundery iron, change into small hissing points, and these
gradually give way to soft floating specks of bluish light as the state
of malleable iron is approached. There is no eruption of cinder as in
the early experiments, although it is formed during the process; the
improved shape of the converter causes it to be retained, and it not
only acts beneficially on the metal, but it helps to confine the heat,
which during the process has rapidly risen from the comparatively low
temperature of melted pig-iron to one vastly greater than the highest
known welding heats, by which malleable iron only becomes sufficiently
soft to be shaped by the blows of the hammer; but here it becomes
perfectly fluid, and even rises so much above the melting point as to
admit of its being poured from the converter into a founder’s ladle, and
from thence to be transferred to several successive moulds.”[31]
[31] “The Creators of the Age of Steel,” p. 71. By W. T. Jeans. New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1884.
What is the value of this process? What is the extent of the service
rendered by Mr. Bessemer to man? It is estimated that in the twenty-one
years first elapsing after the successful working of the Bessemer
process, the production of steel by it, notwithstanding its necessarily
slow progress, amounted to twenty-five million tons. At $200 a ton, the
alleged saving in cost as compared with the old process, this represents
an aggregate saving of $5,000,000,000. In 1882 the world’s production
was four million tons, which at the rate named yielded a saving of the
enormous aggregate of $800,000,000 in a single year.[E7] These sums seem
almost fabulous, especially so since they result from simply blowing air
through crude melted iron for a quarter of an hour! But the radical
character of the change wrought in the metal by the air-blowing process
is shown by the fact that a steel rail is worth as much as twenty iron
rails.[32]
[32] “At the Birmingham meeting of the British Association in 1865,
Sir Henry Bessemer explained that at Chalk Farm steel rails were laid
down on one side of the line and iron rails on the other, so that
every engine and carriage there had to pass over both steel and iron
rails at the same time. When the first face was worn off an iron rail
it was turned the other way upward, and when the second face was worn
out it was replaced by a new iron rail. When Sir Henry exhibited one
of these steel rails at Birmingham only one face of it was nearly worn
out, while on the opposite side of the line eleven iron rails had in
the same time been worn out on both faces. It thus appeared that one
steel rail was capable of doing the work of twenty-three iron
ones.”--“The Creators of the Age of Steel,” p. 93. By W. T. Jeans. New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1884.
All the governments of Europe honored Mr. Bessemer for his great
invention, some by medals and orders of merit, and others by
appropriating without compensation his process of steel-making. Of these
latter Prussia stood in the front rank. England alone stood aloof. “A
prophet is not without honor save in his own country and among his own
kin.” From 1860 to 1872 England continued to load Mr. Gladstone and Mr.
Disraeli with honors, but not until the latter year did the government
recognize Mr. Bessemer, when the Prince of Wales presented him with the
Albert gold medal, and in 1879 he was knighted by the Queen.
A comparison between the lives and services to man of two of the most
distinguished statesmen of England, with the life and services, to man,
of Sir Henry Bessemer, cannot fail to be of great value to every young
man who possesses the power of just discrimination. But can just
discrimination be expected of any young man entering upon the stage of
active life when such discrimination is not possessed by the public at
large? For example: The question being propounded, What is the value of
the combined services to man of Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli, as
compared with those of Sir Henry Bessemer? ninety-nine out of a hundred
men of sound judgment would doubtless say, “The value of the services of
the two statesmen is quite unimportant, while the value of the services
of Mr. Bessemer is enormous, incalculable.” But how many of these
ninety-nine men of sound judgment could resist the fascination of the
applause accorded to the statesmen? How many of them would have the
moral courage to educate their sons for the career of Mr. Bessemer
instead of for the career of Mr. Disraeli or of Mr. Gladstone?* Not many
in the present state of public sentiment. It will be a great day for
man, the day that ushers in the dawn of more sober views of life, the
day that inaugurates the era of the mastership of things in the place of
the mastership of words.
Mr. Gladstone stands for politics and statesmanship at their best, and
his career is the product of the old system of education at its best.
Mr. Bessemer stands for science and art united, and his career is the
product of the new education.
[E7] But the pecuniary value of Mr. Bessemer’s discovery is not the
consideration of chief import. Its social influence extends to the
remotest bounds of civilization, and includes the whole human race,
because it abridges the period of labor necessary to the production of
a given quantity of useful things, thereby enhancing the sum of life’s
comforts and pleasures.